A heavenly spinoff.

 The death god Yama does not appear in Old Monk (2022), but it still feels an awful lot like a Yama movie.  This time, however, the action centers on the heavenly sage narada.  To quote myself from another review, "Narada is a legendary sage who appears in a number of Hindu texts, including both the Mahabharata and the Ramayana.  In the movies, though, he acts as the local divine trickster; if you have a serious problem, you should get Narada to solve it, since it's probably his fault anyway."  Cinematic Narada usually acts a s a foil to Yama or Indra, inadvertently causing chaos which embarrasses the gods but winds up teaching a valuable moral lesson.  This time, though, he winds up ticking off the wrong god.

Krishna (Sunil Raoh) is enjoying a pleasant afternoon in Heaven, watching a cricket match, when Narada (MG Srinivas) drops by to pay him a visit.  Ten minutes later Krishna's chief wife Rukmini (Meghashree) is about to leave him, because Krishna forgot her birthday while Narada made a big show of remembering.  A furious Krishna curses the celestial sage, banishing him to Earth until he can win the heart of a woman and convince her family to agree to a love marriage.

Narada is reborn as Appanna, the HR manager for an IT firm.  Appanna is not popular with his fellow employees, because he hates love and does everything he can to prevent workplace relationships by keeping men and women separate; he doesn't even allow pictures of married gods, so only bachelor deities like Hanuman and Ganesha can be displayed.  

Appanna explains his motivations in a flashback: his earthly father Narayan (S. Narayan) believes that all marriages should be arranged, and so e has spent years sabotaging every one of his son's attempted relationships.  (It's not just Narayan; there have been many unfortunate coincidences which are probably the work of Krishna.)  As a result, Appanna has decided that if he can't be happy, he doesn't see why anybody else should have a good time.  In fact, that's the reason he became an HR manager in the first place.

Two employees in love complain to their new boss (Sihi Kahi Chandru), and he vows to put a stop to Appanna's antics and get them married, or else he will . . . shave off his mustache!  This proves to be a mistake, because while Appanna is human now, he's still a trickster, and soon the wedding is off, along with the mustache.

Appanna and his sidekick Ranveer Singh (Sujay Shastri) visit a very specialized retirement home designed to reunite old flames, and it's there that he meets and immediately falls for Abhigna (Aditi Prabhudeva).  (She's not a resident, she's running the place.) After a rocky start, he manages to win her heart and make friends with all the residents, and everything is going so well that Abhigna invites him to meet her father, who turns out to be his former boss, sans mustache.  

Up in Heaven, Krishna and his one eyed sidekick (I think he might be Time, but he's definitely played by Satish Chandra) decide it's time to introduce the villain.  Shashank (Sudev Nair) is Abhigna's arranged fiance, Appanna's new boss, the son of a powerful and corrupt politician, and he has been holding a grudge against Appanna since college, when one of Appanna's pranks ended up costing him his girlfriend.  Shashank fires Appanna and then invites him to his wedding to Abhigna.  

Since he comes from a political family, Shashank is running for office.  Since he's mad and doesn't have anything else to do with his time, Appanna decides to run against him, and they both make stupid macho vows about Abhigna's hand in marriage while challenging one another, rather than asking her what she thinks.  Shashank comes form a political dynasty that does not fight fair, but Appanna is the earthly incarnation of a celestial trickster; he doesn't fight fair either.

For most of the movie, Appanna is Appanna rather than Narada.  He claims in a voice over to remember every detail of his heavenly existence, but it has no actual impact on the plot.  Even the curse is pretty quickly forgotten, and Krishna and Time(?) are more like Statler and Waldorf than active antagonists.  Still, Appanna is like the cinematic Narada in one very important way: nearly everything that goes wrong is his fault, spinning out of a scheme or scam or trick gone bad.  Old Monk might be structured like a Yama movie, but when you replace the jolly god of death with an ancient sage who can't resist meddling, the end result is rather different.