Listening to his inner call: Sivadas Krishnan

Sivadas Krishnan is grace personified. The well-disciplined performance of a Buddhist scholar in Lenin Rajendran flick Edavapathi leaves no better conclusion to a viewer than this. In minimal dialogues and scenes, he breathed life into the character of guruji to Siddharth Lama, the protagonist. Most theatre lovers have seen him before in another Lenin magnum opus, the well-appreciated light and sound amalgamation of Kumaranasan’s Karuna, a dance drama.

The self-taught actor has been the radiating face of the mendicant monk Upagupta in Karuna sketching the rise and fall of Vasavadutta, a well-off seductress. At an age when many believe they are too cool for school, Sivadas only wanted to pursue his inner call.
 

Nearing mid-thirties, he bid goodbye to the role of a businessman and immersed himself fully into acting. Highly enamoured by the medium of cinema and the dominant picturesque frames, he only aimed to act in a Lenin Rajendran film those days, which now materialised.

“I was drawn too much to his movies, something started from watching Swathi Thirunal. My days went totally dissatisfied in the life as a businessman, which was taking me nowhere, until I decided to let it go forever. Meeting the director was next and I got an invite for Karuna,” Sivadas reminisces.

Being a native of Mananthavady in Wayanad turned out to be advantageous for him to do enough homework and get into the soul of Upagupta and later, the Buddhist scholar. After signing the movie, a three-hour drive daily from home to the nearest Tibetan settlement in Coorg district of Karnataka was his routine.

“Spending time in the Tibetan settlement taught me some basic traits in their behaviour. They have a monastery over there and I understood the calm, composure and facial expressions exhibited by the Buddhist monks. We communicated in English and Hindi. Again it earned a plus point during the shoot of Edavapathi. The dialogues were actually written in Tibetan language which later got dubbed in Malayalam,” says Sivadas.

The mini-screen industry set the early platform to try his skills as an actor. Ever since, destiny had it that he play epical and devotional characters for tele-serials such as Krishnakripasagaram, Swami Ayyappan and Devi Mahatmyam. “In the heavy ornate costumes, none would have identified me in television," he smiles.