‘Craze for money shakes our lives’

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Eminent filmmaker Adoor Gopalakrishnan has come down on crass materialism that saps the soul of Kerala.

Mr Gopalakrishnan told DC on the occasion of its first anniversary in Kerala: “Suddenly consumerism has taken over people.

What’s most important is money. Once you make money you can buy everything else isn’t it? Once a man has money, he wants power, then influence and then he wants to start a channel.

“With a newspaper it’s not easy — people have to buy it. So every rich man is starting a channel and in fact, it’s a very dangerous thing.

“All these channels together have brought down the inherent taste of the people. Look at the channels - they are all supported by jewellery shops. At every three minutes interval in every channel, there is a jewellery shop ad.

“What are they advertising? That, what’s most important in life is to have or buy gold. And the price of gold is going up. There are more burglaries, more snatchings, more issues. Nobody will talk about it. Even newspapers depend on gold jewelers for ads so they can’t talk against them. It’s a very dangerous situation.

I just mentioned jewellery shops; there are other things. If you look at the films being shown, the worst are being shown on TV. A film of any merit will not be shown.
Take these 20 (Malayalam) channels. Not even one shows a film of some merit. They think people want only kachara.”