A new job and a different place of work. Caroline was bothered about moving to a new residence, an apartment with no one else to share the space with. An evening with the roomies, having the damsel in distress in the centre, wore a deserted look until one of them popped a mood-lifter. “Kottayathe aa valiya flatil aa rajakumari ottakkayrunnu.” In seconds, there was loud laughter all around. Fun and banter were back. A modified version applied here, the dialogue of Girirajan Kozhi in the movie Premam is one of the popular film lines in the daily lingo of Malayalis. The quotable quotes from movies have become very much a part of our lives these days, thanks to social media. Merin Kaippan, a finance professional in Kochi, makes the best wisecracks in her circle of friends. She’d often have the accompaniment of a film line to pep up the fun times.
“Most of the jokes or ‘chalu’ we make would either be too serious or create no impact in the listeners at all. Films come to our rescue at this point. A middle path helps us make it as effective as it can be. If you remember a few comedy lines from movies, things are easy. No matter where I am, with friends or at the workplace, cracking such funny lines keeps us feeling refreshed all the time. I doubt if there is an easier way to make quick friends,” says Merin. It will then be no wonder if she makes a new friend with a kaavile bhagavathi neril prathyaksahapettatho or a varyampalleele Meenakshiallyo, entha mole scooterilu? The credit mostly goes to social media but the popularity element shot up about three-four years ago, with the beginning of Facebook photo comments. Punch lines from comedians like Jagathy Sreekumar, Salim Kumar, Kuthiravattam Pappu and Harisree Ashokan were high in demand those days. They have not disappeared anywhere, but transformed. As social media trolls and internet memes, they are still very much here.
Hiran Venugopalan and his companion Orion Champadiyil were the pioneers who propagated a typography-based design experiment in Malayalam with Malayaleegraphy aka Magra in early 2013. The dialogue-inscribed T-shirts, drapes and other merchandise had many eyes on them. Hiran recaps the inception of Magra and the trend. “Well before giving Magra any thought, our get-togethers had film lines. We made references to Dheem Tharikida Thom or Mookkilla Rajyathu. It was not new. Magra was spontaneous and our campaign, we believe, could give the trend an impetus,” says Hiran. Hiran and team needed to make efforts for a few months only, the rest were taken care of by millions of netizens. “The photo comments emerged on Facebook almost at the same time. Sometimes, our own designs came in return as photo comments to the posts we made. It has become so accessible and even without a full sentence or an accompanying scene from a film, people can grasp it. Commenting ‘Poland.jpeg’ would translate to the famous dialogue of Sreenivasan in the movie Sandesham.”
The latest from the team are T-shirt slogans that take a dig at the controversial English subtitling of movies during the International Film Festival of Kerala, a few years ago. A set of students, creators of a promo song for the inter-collegiate art fest at Mar Ivanios College in Thiruvananthapuram, explored this possibility in its making video. The visuals were interspersed with funny quotes from Malayalam films, which became as huge a hit as the Theyyantharo song.
“Whenever we friends sit around and chat, we’d have something or the other related to a film line. The making video was first intended to project the hardships that went behind it, like how we made things work on a shoestring budget. The credit goes to our editor, who added comedy in between to make it a hilarious treat at the end and everyone liked it too,” says Jayasoorya S.J., director of the video. The funny ones are always on the lookout to make it appear more and more effective. Imagination and creativity unrestricted!
