Mathukutty Speaking!

The dialogue gets going. Arun Mathew, popular by his nickname Mathukutty, has been an everyday name for radio listeners for half-a-decade post the FM boom in Kerala. For television audience, this playful host of culinary reality show Dhe Chef has earned the seat of a boy-next-door.

Flitting between radio and television, juggling different hats with elan, this ex-print media journalist does not forget to explore his creative side as a writer. Up his sleeve are two sizeable projects — to pen dialogues for the upcoming projects of Roopesh Peethambaran and B. Unnikrishnan. Mathukutty and Roopesh had earlier teamed for You Too Brutus.

Interestingly, for the first movie he had dialogues for Sreenivasan and this time around, he writes for a comic-thriller starring Vineeth Sreenivasan. “My job for both movies is set to motion. The script discussion is underway. In a month, I expect the dialogue writing to be over.” Mathukutty begins turning loquacious on his most loved avatar on TV.

The cookery show host has an unknown past, where he walked out of his Bachelor’s in Hotel Management studies in a star-rated hotel in Kochi once. And here he is again walking the same ramp once-abandoned. “That time, I had a feeling that the gourmet world was not my calling,” he smiles. On TV, only the food world came beckoning him one after the other. He presented a kid’s cookery show Kuttikalavara before coming for Dhe Chef.

Mathukutty has chosen a different role in radio becoming a consultant for the FM station that quick fixed his popular name. “Mathukutty was a nick name during college days. So many Aruns were there and the modified version of my surname — which is also my father’s — became a particular identity for me as I was involved in student politics. By the end of the course, everyone forgot ‘Arun’. In radio, a college mate of mine had also got in. Every time he’d address me as Mathukutty and it became my RJ name,” he says. He also keeps a blog ‘mathukuttitham’ to jot down his sudden onrush of creative ideas.