09 September,2009 08:04 AM IST | | Romal M Singh
When the 55th National Film Awards were announced, the media went berserk announcing that South India had swept the awards. Yes, this was something for everyone to celebrate about, but it did bring back a part of me that was lost somewhere, as I grew up into a young boy in South India.
A huge fan of cinema in all its avatars, I have enjoyed and loved movies ever since I could understand practically anything at all! South Indian cinema came naturally to me, growing up in a town as quintessentially South Indian as could possibly be Kotagiri in The Nilgiris.
I immediately took to loving good Tamil cinema and as I grew older, my love for Telugu and Malayalam cinema also grew. I then discovered Manipuri cinema when I was around 14 and I'm happy it was that late, as cinema of such realistic quality requires a certain age and an acquired love for subtle aesthetics. My introduction to Kannada cinema began only 7 years ago however, and now several years later, I am still a toddler in the genre.
I have, however, realised that the golden age of commercial Kannada cinema has passed us, while parallel cinema still reigns high.
A sense of evolved thought and a love for culture and deep-rooted philosophies in the region often made for sensitive story telling and my list of favorites from the area will never end. But, it was always surprising that South Indian cinema did so badly when it came to the national arena.
For a relatively non-biased viewer, I loved Bollywood, but that wasn't cinema enough and here were these amazing movies from elsewhere that influenced me and reorganised my imagination with every passing year.
These were the movies that deserved the awards, at least when one compares with award-winning films in the west good cinema always triumphed over good entertainment!
Yet, year after year, Bollywood films always raked in these awards, irrespective of them being worth it or not.
For a while, as the atypical South Indian, I passed it off saying, 'who cares!'
But now, I do care! I did care when a movie like Paheli went to the Oscars! Imagine films like Page 3 being given the coveted Swarna Kamal (Golden Lotus) when the same award has been given to fabulous films like Vaanaprastham, Dweepa and Marupakkam it makes no sense whatsoever.u00a0 Yes, one might call me a pretentious prick for being such an 'elite cinema' lover, but these movies showed in theatres and they were hits in their respective states. They did deal with topics that might be considered intellectual, but were packaged in ways that made them accessible to anyone. These were tales of the people for the people.
Cinema need not be an escape from reality. It can sometimes be an escape to reality, like in many of Bharathiraaja's movies. You needn't sell dreams to make them. Sometimes just showing life, as it is, as colorful as it comes, suffices. I now have decided to stop playing dead, as there suddenly seems to be new hope! Giving up on the National Awards helped nobody!
