Khalid Mohamed

Now, thousands of bouquets — of the verbal kind — may be lavished upon film personalities. But anything resembling a brickbat reduces those roses to ashes. One squeak of dissent and you’ve invoked the wrath of the Mr and Mrs Perfects.

Okay, so that’s no breaking news. You must have heard of countless celebrities who can’t take criticism. What I can’t fathom are shifts of gear. Like Kamal Haasan’s statement, on the eve of the release of the Hindi version of Vishwaroopam, that Mumbai has always been kind and welcoming to him. Really? Quite debatable that.
After all, despite his supreme acting talent, and sporadic hits, Kamal sir couldn’t find a toe-hold in Hindi language cinema. After an official announcement, Rajkumar Santoshi had no business to drop him from Ghatak, and bring in Sunny Deol. Unjust but true.
For this Sunday, I would like to talk (write, I mean) about the Kamal Haasan I thought I knew. On watching him in Sagar Sangaman and Nayakan, followed by Thevar Magan, Moondram Pirai, Appu Raja and Pushpak, I could detect that he was an artiste who had more acting coursing through his veins than any other actor of the 1970s-’80s. I wrote up so many verbal paeans that my Remington typewriter was about to pack up in protest.
Every visit to Chennai meant an extensive interview session, through which I learnt considerably about the actor and the man. He was frazzled by the split from Vani Ganapathy, was reaching a balance with Sarika who was as manically fond of world cinema as he was. They’d be at international film festivals together, they’d talk of Kurosawa glowingly. That was my kind of Kamal Haasan, for whom life and cinema were inextricably intertwined.
Kamal sir, always on the dot of time for a Q&A at his old-worldly Rajkamal Films production office, once admitted frankly, “I am a limelight moth” — absolutely in contrast to Amitabh Bachchan who has been irrevocably self-effacing. To each actor his own.
Then Chachi 420 transpired. A common photographer friend was to direct the comedy obviously inspired by Mrs Doubtfire. They had a fallout for a variety of reasons, including creative. And I was willy-nilly caught in the crossfire. Kamal sir, I suspect, felt that I had to take a stand, and break ties with the common friend.
A PR person added fuel to the bonfire, filling his ears with the lie that I had planted a vituperative article against him in a magazine, a rival to the one where I was working. Absurd! Anyway the damage was done. Next: He looked through me in the course of a Mumbai-Chennai airflight, focusing on his laptop instead. So be it. Critics are accustomed to such attitudes: It hurts but heals.
The events in the last fortnight vis-a-vis Kamal Haasan’s Vishwaroopam catch him in another light altogether. Surprise, surprise. The man’s vulnerable. The espionage thriller which drew unwarranted flak from Muslim groups, besides intervention from Tamil Nadu’s Chief Minister Jayalalithaa, was cleared, but not without major side-effects. His photographs with Rekha and Salman Khan at a screening of Vishwaroopam in Mumbai were splashed across the newspapers.
Now that the ban conflagration is over, there’s a sense of relief. Kamal Haasan is an unparalleled actor, a self-confessed limelight moth. So here’s keeping fingers crossed that he understands that bouquets and brickbats, from all sorts of quarters, are a part of every celebrity’s baggage. Life doesn’t always come up roses.