Thursday, August 05, 2004

On some Vikatan books and director Bala

An interesting and absorbing series has just come to an end in the Tamil weekly Ananta Vikatan. Authored by writer S.Ramakrishnan and titled ‘ThunaiEzhuthu’ (Supporting Letter), the series was one of the best ones I had read in magazines. It is a series of essays focusing on various topics sometimes quite abstract. The author usually starts of with a personal incident, but soon goes to a deeper and somewhat philosophical interpretation of the topic that is usually quite touching and also thought provoking. Hopefully, Vikatan should be publishing this as a book as they do for most of their series articles. Then it would be a must buy for me.

Meanwhile, one of the books already published by Vikatan which would be good buy is Evan thaan Bala (He is Bala), a semi-auto biographical account by director Bala. It recently came as a series in the same magazine and I read most of the parts. Atleast according to me, it is a very frank account of his life by Bala. To those who are not aware of Bala, he is currently one of top directors of Tamil cinema. Many adore his direction style and some others, I guess, hate it. The reason may be that all his 3 films so far have been quite disturbing and end in tragedy. Still his first film (Sethu remade in Hindi as Tere Naam) was a blockbuster and others were also hits. Though regarded by many to be on the same league as Mani Ratnam, his direction style is quite different. For one, he shuns any form of glamour, which may be results in an added emphasis on violence in most of his films. Interestingly, I have observed that many die hard fans of Mani detest Bala. Frankly, I like both their films though they are very different. I was intrigued by the weirdness of Bala’s films and started reading this series to know more about this. This book could be quite inspirational to many, as Bala describes his transformation from reckless, uncared for and rowdy youth to one of the top directors in Tamil cinema. Both the books are published by Vikatan Publications.