Padmarajan - The celestial auteur

" The vineyards of imagination will not effloresce again. But whenever it blossomed, it yielded a sweet wine of art. For all the connoisseurs, who live today and who haven't even born today, to savor enough ... "

Today is the nineteenth death anniversary of one of the greatest artists to ever grace the Indian Silver Screen. P. Padmarajan, the celestial auteur who shall never be forgotten by the film loving people, the master story teller who narrated to us stories that were firmly rooted in the soil and the artist whose imagination had no boundaries. Each and every film of Padmarajan was different from the previous one. Novelty of themes was his hallmark. The innovative treatment added spice to his films. His strength lay in his literary background, he was one of the youngest writers to win the Kerala Sahitya Academy Award. The voids left behind by his untimely demise have never been filled and he was an artist who was truly unique. The lovers of serious cinema offer their profound obeisance to the master craftsman with a heavy heart and bleary eyes.

I was 10 or 11 years old when I saw Pappettan's film for the first time. Koodevide, the film that introduced me to the world of a man about whom I have read a lot, made me an instant fan of the heavenly director. It was soon followed by Namukku Parkkan Munthirithoppukal, an evergreen classic about the depth of love and soon he became the man who I admire the most in my life. Pappettan's characters were never larger than life, the star was always the story and the protagonists were just instruments to portray the tale. Pappettan's films never had predictable ending. Quite often those denouements flashed in my mind with the leisurely defined precision of images from a slow motion film. His films refused to leave my mind, more often than not they made me hopelessly sad. Padmarajan never lowered himself to a standardized level so as to conform to the accessibility and understanding of a greater audience, which unfortunately many filmmakers of his generation did. As an artist, he never compromised on the integrity of his artistry. That way he never contributed to the decline of film as a form of art and perennially flattered the thinking abilities of the audience through his works.

Padmarajan established himself as a writer. But he earned more fame through films. His writing skills helped him a lot to excel as a script writer. His characters spoke without guile and they were all distinct from each other. The depth he gave to relatively unimportant characters professes his extraordinary skills. Just as the film crazy followers of his were looking for more miracles from him, he left us in a cold January night in 1991. Like the hero of his last film, Njhan Gandharvan, he too left us forever in the night.

I really long to watch a new film by Padmarajan, to wait eagerly for the release of the film, to bask in the glory of anticipatory delight which would often rival the pleasure viewing the film would have brought me and finally to crown myself with the euphoria of aesthetic pleasure after watching it. I know very well that it is a dream that shall always remain a fantasy. But then what is art without the beauty of melancholic unattainable fantasies ? I close my bleary eyes, thank him for the eternal joy that he had offered me through his works, pray for his soul to rest in peace and whisper silently, "Pappetta, we miss you so much..."

The Worthless Pearl

This poem was the residuum of the romantic interludes of a sensitive heart eager to toddle in the vagaries of selfless love. The pain manifested in these lines stems mainly from the inadequacies and tribulations that contravened the cognition of genuine devoted love.

Crept into the oyster, a grain of sand,
And images of her into his barren mind.
Oyster was what she in this birth
For him life then became a quest for mirth.
She found it hard to remove the grain,
Couldn't he remove her memories in the drain.
Piercing pain was what they both felt
And not a heart did ever melt.
Nurtured she the grain with advance of time
Nurtured he, her memories without caring about time.
And time gifted them both with a pearl, ethereal
In him it was called love, that made unreal real.
Pearl was a drop of love with eternal elegance
Love was also a pearl with seraphic silence.
The pearl was priceless if or not acceptable
But love never had any value when unacceptable.
To get the pearl, natures admirers made her killed
And he slashed his mind which was really skilled
With time more precious became the real pearl
But just a prank of time was the worthless pearl.

January 2002

Immortal flames

I wrote this poem, as a dedication to three of my friends who drowned in the river Bhadra, Mangalore. May their souls rest in peace !

The winds of time blew out those mortal flames
But only after lighting few other immortal flames.
The winds of time will touch those immortal flames never
And those immortal flames of memory will glow on forever.

Your smile will never delight our minds and eyes
Nor will it stop deceiving our bleary eyes.
You are gone, but not our ethereal love
As stars bestow it on us forever from above.

In our hearts, forever you will be very near
The buds of love you have sown there, bloomed to a drop of tear.
Thankful we are, for partaking our joys and fears
In return for your selfless love, offer we nothing, but drops of tears.

July 2000

January 21

It's a new year and already 20 days have gone past. Time literally flies but memories don't. I get up to a very cold morning, here in Bangalore, and for a moment contemplate about the relevance of this day in my life and how I had spent this day in the previous years. Sounds crazy but then when were I ever normal ?

On a sudden bout of inspiration, I decided to pen down my thoughts in this place. To leave digital footprints of my random thoughts for posterity! I am totally out of mood and despondent but those who know me wouldn't be surprised as that's the outfit of my mind for the past few months. The trials and tribulations of Harish Babu has only started. There is no mattress for the mind and I don't expect myself to be sane either.

I always loved the sanity of my insane thoughts. I reveled in them, and often they were juxtaposed with a melancholic trip down the memory lane. I wanted to add something creatively but my grey cells have gone on a strike. I think I need to take a break from this futile attempt. I have the satisfaction that I have finally started to blog. I always wanted to do this but laziness always got the better of me. With a feeling that a start is always better than anticipation of a good start, I log off.

The light has gone out but the shadows remain forever...

Lemme tell you a story about a guy called Feather, a guy with lots of artistic integrity and creative exuberance. And a plebian who aspired to be a patrician among the connoisseurs of arts !

He was treading off the beaten path and I walked a few paces along with him. The path was rugged and snaked through thick impenetrable woods. He looked etiolated and phlegmatic, resigned to the triviality of ever consuming uncertainties. His gait lacked aplomb but was never aquiver. His forlorn eyes had denied sleep of it's natural habitat and were hypnotic manifestations of existential crisis. A wayward wind billowed his shirt and reminded him of his freedom, and the repurcussions of accepting or rejecting that freedom. A cognitive dissonance pervaded his whole being and he seemed to be in a perennial dilemma about how to confront it. The huge blanket of darkness enshrouded us and made us oblivious of the faint light of moon and stars. The yin, darkness was clearly more assertive than the yang, brightness. Figuratively it elucidated Feather also ! The yin, femininity, within him was always more powerful than the yang, masculinity inside him !

Feather carried a lighted candle in a coconut shell. The flame guttered in the marauding onslaught of winds but refused to blow out. The flame struggled to wrest space from the unrelenting darkness, quite similar to how our dreamz wrangled with the unbending realities. Feather spoke eloquently. He told me his surreal tale, about how he spent time with the yin within him. The moments when propinquity of thoughts made words redundant, the moments when covetousness sparked self actualization, the moments when emotions professed acquiescence and those moments of light with resplendent colors which left fragmented shadows of memories that would last forever. However, mysticism could not control the attitude of yin to the external world, the world outside Feather, in which she resided perennially though metaphorically she always nested inside Feather. She sought her self actualization by rejecting him. She honored her ethical obligation to a world outside Feather by circumventing her moral obligation to be with him always, which would in turn bring her appreciation from multitude. For Feather, who saw art in everything, that was nothing but Aesthetic Realism. And he loved her more for that renunciation !

I listened to him without interrupting and glanced at the candle flame. I knew very well that the shell would ultimately protect it from any gale and it can never be snuffed out no matter how strong the tempest is. He caught my furtive glance and whispered something. May be, the sanest choice is to insanely protect your eternal flames of hope with the shell of your instincts so that the insane winds of realities cannot blot it out. I took leave of him and watched him go. As he faded into the eagerly consuming darkness, his words echoed in my ears. The light has gone out but the shadows remain forever. And those shadows have lighted flames that shall never fade, the eternal flames...

Feather

A bit of insanity, a bit of creativity, a bit of non conformity - thats me, Feather

I believe in rebirths. So I presume I migrated to India in this incarnation. Nothing much happened untill I committed my greatest crime. Passing the 12th standard exams. This juvenile criminal was sentenced for four years in Engineering along with a heavy fine. Writing skills blossomed for a while but soon it died a premature death. I served my sentence and soon Mangalore university exonerated me with a Degree certificate. Intellectual poverty, lack of ambitions, creativity bankruptcy - due to the heavy tech load, all made me sell myself as a slave to MNCs.The nomadic instincts made it difficult for me to stay in one city for more than one year. I also realised that Technology has got more animosity towards Creativity than Capitalism ever had for Communism. So here I am, a natural born dreamer perpetually lost in the warp of time...