November 26, 2009 3:46:40 PM IST Enkayaar, Bollywood Trade News Network

How can we say that the cinema of South India indeed has evolved into monster of a brand and has reached a stage where anybody who ignores it, does it as its own peril. It is manifest from the fact that the recently conducted Media and Entertainment Conclave conducted by FICCI at Chennai; Kamal Hassan was accorded the honor to chair the session for two consecutive days. No other actor anywhere has been given such an honor from the entertainment industry to chair the session for two consecutive days.

The attention that has been given to South Indian cinema by FICCI has been primarily owing to the fact that South Indian cinema having a robust growth of more than fifty years has survived and created its own branch of idiom capitalizing on its ethnic elements. It has at no point of time subsumed its identity to any other cultural mainstream but has further fine-tuned the nuances to be as diverse as possible. No wonder, it is this quest to maintain and preserve the ethnicity that has been the catalytic factor for series of hits in South India and their adoption into the Hindi film world on a progressive basis.

The choice of Kamal Hassan to chair the session at FICCI conclave is symptomatic about the fact. Here is an actor who has tried to give cinematic expression to one form or the other of nuance through his films, be it HINDUSTANI, DASHAVATARAM, NAYAGAN, APPU RAJA or most of his other recent films.

Kamal Hassan's choice is also guided by the fact that he has been at the forefront of adoption of technology to relive the era of the past as also to underline the element of ethnicity of a cinematic oeuvre that makes cinema a product worth viewing. He was the first man who could morph the picture of Subhash Chand Bose along with himself in HINDUSTANI, and he did it at the time when Hollywood was also doing the same thing contemporarily.

South Indian cinema in fact does not think twice before experimenting and this has been the primary reason why it has created new frontiers of success. It is also the time when Hindi cinema should have a relook and turn back to its ethnic nuance that it has somehow left behind in its zeal to be global. It is the element of ethnicity that indeed makes each product unique in its own manner, otherwise it becomes an assembly line project, for which it is not necessary that it may emerge a hit or not.


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