The Ego Surfer

Most Tamil moviemakers, it seems to me, are school dropouts, single, rural and perverted. Almost every movie unfolds – and tears apart – in a village. “Kounder ayya!!” the hapless village folk bend over to touch the sand the hero had just treaded to the sound of conches and women making suggestive sounds using their tongues. “Veera Koundaru varaaru, then singam varaaru!” a song resounds in the background as the hero takes a 3-½ minute walk down the lush, green Pollachi fields with villagers waving their “angavastrams” – and “dhotis” – for visual effect and old women feeding him leftovers. The movies, using the village “perrivars” as their mouthpiece, would copiously lecture the audience about the hypocrisy of the rich and the city folk (no differentiation there), dispense the loutish city slickers with tame lessons on jurisprudence and sycophancy, highlight the degeneration of culture amongst the educated (abetted by rapturous applause from illiterate front-benchers), and of c...

It was a warm, pleasant summer day when I landed in the US to pursue my version of the much-touted ‘American Dream’. The year was 1994. Indians, humongously more illustrious had been arriving at US shores for more than four decades, then. To be sure, I was under no illusion then that my ride was going to be smooth. I absolutely knew that my dip into the American melting pot would have its own challenges and surprises. “India!” I told with palpable pride to the politely curt immigration official first, and then to my colleagues at work later and expected laudatory nods on hearing the country of my origin. That didn’t happen. What left me more flummoxed was how, about one-fifths of humanity, figured nowhere in their value systems - news, politics, society or economics. I initially took it upon myself to educate people about my country but realized later – with a pang of agony – that people didn’t want to know. In the “New World”, they were not interested to know how a five thousand year ...

My friend Kumaresh quite suddenly treaded into the movie industry. He just got into the groove and got caught in the web, before he could say “Bandha” (which was the name of the first movie he produced)! Kumaresh was a flamboyant character who always set the ambience afire with his inscrutable personality and his inimitable humor. That was how he caught the eye of a rapacious film industry personality, in faraway Houston, who tried hard to tie him into the film industry and use his software money to fund insipid and sentimental yarns from Kodambakkam. And succeeded. One thing led to another and Kumaresh, already one enamored by glamour and glitz, which was evasive in the software industry, fitted into the image-conscious industry like the pieces of a puzzle. A year (and a few million dollars) later, when I met him in his film office, he was clad in a kitschy printed shirt, masticating a meetha pan. He sported a longer moustache that gravitated toward his proud chin, had a “chandana pot...

I can remember weird things in the murkiest corners of my mind. There doesn’t seem to be a whole lot of things that I have forgotten from my childhood. I still remember the whiff of fresh air at dusk near the “Ala maram” of St. Anthony’s Higher Secondary School, Thanjavur; my “Palingu” sessions with Kandasamy and Charles at “Selvam Colony”, Arulananda Nagar; my walk back with Sushila, the maid, from Shankara School, RA Puram, my first bicycle and my first cricket match at Chepauk. I even remember the day Manish, my fourth standard classmate, drank lukewarm rose milk at my newly constructed home in Thiruvanmiyur. And about Swami, my dear friend of primary school years, my escapades with him are as fresh in my memory as my mom’s Rasam that I devoured over last night. But why do I so inexorably sham ignorance of all those crystal-clear memories when a cousin or an old high-school friend rekindles them. Am I afraid of my past? Or ashamed of it? What is the reason for this fake Alzheimer’s?...