Visually appealing
This dashing young scion from the family that owns an iconic single screen movie theatre in Frazer Town talks about the future ahead
Update: 2015-11-21 22:50 GMT
Some of the earliest memories of Yogesh Kshatriya, the third generation owner of the Bengaluru landmark, Everest Talkies, is spooling film rolls in the projection room of the legendary theatre. “I was all of five or six years old when I first began spending my two-month summer vacations feeding film spools into the projector for daytime shows. I also used ride my dad’s bike up and down the parking lot and once got an earful from him for trying to do wheelies on the premises,” begins Kshatriya.
Now 20 years later, films have become effortless to screen, but Kshatriya never likes to take the easy route. That’s precisely why he has turned his theatre into a hub for documentary filmmakers, with one Thursday of the month dedicated to indie films. “I wanted to do something more rather than something as easy as screening commercial films. I was approached by this indie filmmakers’ group called Vikalp Bangalore for a week-long film festival. It then became a weekly affair. Local filmmakers don’t have a platform to screen their work. Most of the time, their films are shown at make-shift venues with below average sound systems. While Everest is not the biggest cinema hall in the city, it is a great space for documentaries,” he shares.
With hectic 16-hour work days, Kshatriya enjoys unwinding over a game of foosball at his favourite watering hole in the city. “Foosball is a weekly ritual for my friends and me. And we take it very seriously,” he laughs. He also loves taking his Harley Davidson 48 a long ride, “But I’m so strapped for time that I don’t do it as often as I want to,” he tells us.
Also an animal lover, he recently adopted a street dog whom he found on the outskirts of the city. “My friend and I were driving through Dodaballapur and I saw this badly hurt dog near a bakery. So I took him in and he’s turned into a gorgeous fellow,” he says.
A Shaolin Kung-Fu practitioner who holds classes for a select group of Kannada and Tamil film stars at his theatre, Kshatriya discovered the art while on work in China. “I was actually filming a documentary myself about the life of the Shaolin monks. They come to the monastery when they’re as young as six and seven and when they turn 21, they are given the choice to leave the place or stay back. I spent 15 months in the country and learnt from a skilled practitioner who became my master. Now I return to the country every year to celebrate my birthday with him,” reveals the young man, whose next visit to China is in April next year, during which time he hopes to complete filming the documentary and also get some more sessions of Kung-Fu training in.
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