Aryan (1988)

Devanarayanan is a well-educated young man from a poor Brahmin family in Kerala. Despite his qualifications, he cannot find work, and his anger at a system he sees as closed to him grows with every rejection. He leaves for Bombay, where he falls in with the city's underworld and rises fast, discovering that the power denied to him by honest means is easy to seize through crime. Priyadarshan, better known for his comedies, made Aryan as a hard-edged social and crime drama from a script by T. Damodaran, who wrote several politically charged films of the period. Mohanlal's intense performance carries the film, and it was a commercial success in 1988. Its comments on caste and jobs made it a talking point at the time.