Age of reality

Destiny, for Anila S.K., is very very real. It’s changed her life that would otherwise have been a lot predictable perhaps, she says. Anila puts her life into a neat order when she narrates her early years in Thiruvananthapuram, going to Cotton Hill School, taking a degree in English Literature and then the turning points coming, first as a marriage to a Sri Lankan, then as a move to Colombo, as new job profiles including a career as a UN official, and finally the sudden decision to leave all that to go back to her childhood dream — making a film. When she did that, she chose people from inside her home, family and friends to play the characters in Oraazhcha, a film that showed the everyday problems of old age. It premiered at the Jaffna International Film Festival in Sri Lanka, and Anila wants a screening in her hometown, Thiruvananthapuram.

“I had wanted to make a film since I was 15,” Anila says, sipping a glass of mojito at the Zenzerro Café in Thiruvananthapuram. She has to go back to Colombo the next day, she’s been a Sri Lankan citizen for years now. “It’s my marriage to a Sri Lankan citizen that took me there,” she says. Prasanna Hettiarachchi was a young delegate at the SAARC scholarship programme in Japan that Anila had also attended. That had again been the work of destiny, she believes. All she did was participate in the Republic Day parade as a student. And there comes a letter from the Central Ministry for Youth Affairs saying she has been selected to represent India in the SAARC programme along with nine others. “I have no idea how I got it.”

Two years later, she got married to Prasanna and began what she calls the second phase of her life. She had by then begun a career in media, working in Doordarshan and All India Radio. But in Sri Lanka, she began as a science writer for an international organisation. And then, just like that, she got her next calling in Mexico, teaching creative writing at the Tec De Monterrey. Nearly two years there and it was back to Sri Lanka, where an entirely new career waited for Anila. She joined as communications officer working under the president, for coordinating the peace process with the LTTE.

“From working in the media in my early days to joining a government office that managed the media, I have been on both sides,” Anila says. She went on to take a degree in international relations and a PG in Development Studies. She began working in UN programmes, for the World Food Programme in Sri Lanka, then going to Sudan in Africa for a year. But then through all this, Anila had felt a sense of incompletion in her life. There still remained that old dream to make a film, something that came out of the reading habit her schoolteacher dad gave all his three children. “Whenever I read classics, I would see it all in front of me.” That visual effect became the dream of a film. And even as she was satisfied with her academic career, this old passion needed attention. “I knew that it had to be now or never,” says Anila, who is now single. She left her job and came on a visit home to make that film. Her first stop was in Chennai, at Mindscreen, Rajiv Menon’s Film School, for a six-month course. Then she went to Kerala, knocked on three doors, to be an assistant director. “But no doors opened. So I thought let me try make something small.”

A still from the film

The small became big when her classmate told her if she added a little more to it, it could be a feature film. Oraazcha became the story of an old couple going through the everyday difficulties that only the elderly knew about. “Each time I visited home, I saw my parents ageing. I am very close to them. While my father is happy with his friends’ circle and pension, my mother wanted to connect to the younger generation and learn to use phones and technology. Every time the grandchildren came home, they would be engrossed in their phones. Even my generation seemed to be a little distant.” Then there were other observations. Anila would watch her mother trying to board a bus whose steps were too high for her to climb. “I began observing other old people, and it is the same everywhere. There was a lack of system in place to support the aged.”

She was stuck for money and decided to cast people she knew. Her dad became the old man in the film, but her mom failed the audition. So for the female lead, Anila searched for her old schoolteacher Sreedevi and found her in an old age home. The camera is by Shyamaprakash, her nephew, and sound by Arun Varghese, his friend. Her brother wrote the lyrics, and the music is by another relative, Pavithran. Even the neighbours acted. She is trying to screen it in Thiruvananthapuram. But while at it, she has already begun work on her second film, a Tamil-Singhalese one.