Nandhaa is a movie about a young man from a juvenile jail coming back to a society and his family he had left many years ago. It is about a battle of love and life of this once-upon-a-time misfit who tries to fit into the usual social circus, a fight to earn his mother's love and a fight to live the second chance he has given himself. Surya who plays the key role is sent to a rehabilitation center for murdering his father as a boy. He returns home to a mother and a sister who are still in a state of shock after what has happened to their family. He decides to get a new life by trying to give himself a college education. Having the record of being an ex-convict he finds it difficult to get a seat in a college. He meets Raj Kiran a disciplinarian, a college principal who runs his college with an iron hand. Raj Kiran develops a soft corner for Surya and guides him like his own son. Laila, an exile from Sri Lanka meets Surya and both fall in love. Meanwhile the villain Saravanan asks Raj Kiran who also helps Sri Lankan students in his college a lot to aid an anti-social element, but Raj Kiran refuses outright. Meanwhile Raj Kiran falls sick and gets admitted in the hospital, Surya stays around to look after Raj Kiran his mentor and guide. Fearing what he has done might be out in the light, the son-in-law pulls out the oxygen tube of Raj Kiran in the hospital when Surya is not around and blames Surya of murdering his father-in-law. Surya having to deal with the pain of losing the only man who gave him a second chance to live, also struggles the fray of being convicted of murder once again. Finally he is acquitted, as there are no eyewitnesses to the murder. Surya has aptly displayed his yearning to be loved by his mother while Laila plays the role of the innocent love struck Sri Lankan girl in a very convincing fashion. Scenes were he asks his mentally demented to feed him are quite moving. After being acquitted for Raj Kiran's murder he returns home. His paranoid mother who still believes that her son still has murder instincts waits at home to feed a meal, which she has poisoned herself.