Airlift's Kerala connection

The line casually slips out. “I am from Kerala”. Director Raja Krishna Menon begins his answer like that. Someone would’ve asked what gave him the idea of Airlift, a film about the evacuation of Indians from Kuwait during the Iraq invasion. The Kerala connection is self-explanatory. There were so many Malayalis, ‘half of Kerala or someone they knew’. His own Kerala connection begins in Thrissur, where he was born.

“I moved to Bengaluru when I was a few months old. My mother - Girija Menon - had set up a small foundry there,” he says. After that, Kerala became the place for summer vacations, climbing the mango trees, playing around the tulsi pond. “We were always there for pooram, my granddad was quite involved.”

Raja has plenty to say about his grandfather, VKG Menon. He was in the first batch of the Banaras University, and fought for freedom. “One time during the World War, he drove a car from Indore to Thrissur.”

The grandfather and his mother had greatly influenced Raja. But none of them, not even he in his wildest imagination, thought that one day he would turn to cinema.

That was a ‘freak accident’ after college. He had gone to the Christ College in Bengaluru ‘which was pretty much like being in Kerala’. There were a lot of Malayalis and Raja got into student politics.

“It was just before V.P. Singh came into power. There was a lot of student activism, looking up at Janata Dal as a possible hope for change and Mandal Commission happened.” But the politics ended inside the college.

Outside of it, he wanted a job, coming from a regular middle class family. One month, he spent selling yellow pages, till his conscience struck him hard. The next thing he knew, a friend in advertising had got him a job with D. Radhakrishnan, ad filmmaker and photographer, and that changed his life.

“The day after I joined him, he was shooting a commercial for HMT watches. I was just mesmerised by the process. That day I felt this is what I wanted to do. I found my passion. Then I moved to Mumbai.”

There came a string of ad films. In 2003, his first feature film Bas Yun Hi happened with Nandita Das and Purab Kohli in the lead. His second, Barah Aana, in 2009, had been with Naseeruddin Shah. Both films were critically acclaimed and somehow stayed away from mainstream cinema.

“I thought my first film was very mainstream and that was a mistake I made. I tried to make it for the audience, with credit cards and borrowing money from everybody we could. The biggest learning was to not make a film that didn’t come from the heart.”

The second too, he thought was mainstream. “But I was told it wasn’t. I believe both those films, if I had bigger stars and a marketing budget, would be considered mainstream. Naseeruddin Shah is a huge star but he is seen as an alternate actor.”

When it came to Airlift, he knew the story would appeal to a larger audience. “It was far more mainstream, it had Akshay Kumar. We have not gone into making the film as a mainstream film. What’s important is we managed to make a decent film without compromising on what we wanted to make.”

Raja has said several times the main character played by Akshay - Ranjit Katiyal - is not based on a single person, but loosely on several. One of them happens to be Sunny Mathews in Kerala. He had spoken to his son Joe Mathews but had not visited Kerala for the film. But then he had roped in an actor from Kerala - Lena.

“I told her, ‘Lena, please say no to the film. I would feel terrible to put you in a small role’. She said she wanted to.” She did so well that Naseeruddin Shah, after watching the film, asked Raja, ‘Who is that? She is brilliant.’

“Kerala has the best kind of acting talent in the country,” says Raja. He is a fan of Aravindan’s work and Srinivasan’s writing. He fondly recounts meeting Adoor Gopalakrishnan and is all praise for Anjali Menon. One day, he says, he’ll be good enough to make a Malayalam film.