Thank You Selvaraghavan!

This is a small thank you note for  Selvaraghavan who is set to have his next work “Nenjam Marapathillai” screened soon.

Selvaraghavan is a brutally honest filmmaker who is often stereotyped with giving hits that belong to a gray genre.  He started with a story that was known to everyone but never told out loud as it should have been, everyone who has crossed the teens would have been able to associate with his first two movies. He has moved on from there and has gone on to make films with such conviction that has made his fans believe, whatever the film is, it will be honest at it.  It matters not, if it’s successful as “Aayirathil Oruvan” or a damp squib at the box office like “Irandam Ulagam”, one cannot mistake the intention of those attempts. Selvaraghavan has so much to say in each of his movies, never can you sense an empty rhetoric in any of his movies. There is a purpose behind every dialogue that is uttered, perhaps that is the reason the actors never seem so real in their respective “other” movies.

He talks very highly of Mani Ratnam, I personally believe that the admiration will be mutual, for Selva is no less a genius and his body of work speaks for it. He has probably had more number of movies shelved than that were actually made, there could be multiple reasons for each of those and one can only hope that some of them see the light of the day soon. Selvaraghavan is widely respected among the fans and this is something that he has earned by being ruthlessly honest in his films, there are other contemporaries who have managed to carve a name for themselves, none as original as Selva.  It is very hard to see a film maker who does not lose his identity in the journey of film making, we have seen many directors come back after a flop with so many compromises that the only thing the movie does is collect money. Selvaraghavan seems to work the exact opposite, where after a commercial debacle, his movie comes back to haunt you as if saying “This is who I am, deal with it”.

If success in movie making was measured with the impact on the audience, Selvaraghavan would be the best competition for Mani Ratnam leaving the rest stationed miles away. I sincerely hope that Selvaraghavan finds producers to fund all his scripts and enthralls us with his work. Thank You Selvaraghavan for being an honest film maker despite everything.