Kottayam: Joseph Pulikkunnel was a proponent of reforms in the Catholic Church for which he worked tirelessly and set up many institutions at Oshana Mount, Edamattam near Pala, his native place. He published the Oshana Bible and the Oshana magazine aimed at spreading his views. The first edition of the popular Oshana Bible, comprising 25,000 copies, was released with the joint effort of 25 scholars. It later became a widely-read version extending to 15 editions. Till then there were only limited editions of Bible with difficult translations.
The Oshana monthly was brought out from a rented room in Pala and the first copy was released by Joseph Mundassery at a meeting presided over by Ponkunnam Varkey in October 1975. It continued publication till March 2014 when his health condition weakened. Due to the requests from the public, it was printed once in three months till March 2017. Through it, Pulikunnel, a member of the Syro-Malabar Church, demanded the establishment of a law for the administration of the Church, the non- application of the canon law for Indian Church and called for liturgical reforms.
Pulikunnel established the Indian Institute of Christian Studies ( IICS) for conducting studies on world religions with a well-equipped library at Oshana Mount, spread over seven acres, in 1994. He also began a pain and palliative care unit for cancer patients and a dialysis centre. Pulikkunnel started the work to translate the Bible from English to Malayalam in 1981 and completed it in 1983.
He invited criticism from certain quarters when he organised seminars and discussions involving RSS leader K.S. Sudarshan at Oshana Mount. He was against the dominance of priesthood in Church affairs. His will states that his funeral should be conducted without any rituals and that he should be cremated in the compound of his house, where his wife Kochurani was cremated in 2008.
The assets at the Oshana Mount are looked after by a trust in which his children have no say, according to his will.
Joseph Pulikkunnel.
Church ‘reformer’ Joseph Pulikunnel passes away
The director of the low-budget film 'Irattajeevitham' (Double life) has alleged that the regional officer of the Central Board Film Certification (CBFC) in Thiruvananthapuram had forced him to drop the voice overlap mentioning Vijay Mallya, the absconding liquor baron, in the film. It is the first directorial venture of Suresh Narayanan, made on a shoestring budget of less than Rs 40 lakh. He said he had no option other than dropping the sequence as the regional officer insisted on it for issuing the certification before December 31.
"I am at a loss to understand why the official insisted on removing the voice overlap. In the film the said sequence has been conceived as a voice overlap heard from a television news channel and there was nothing controversial about it", he said. The news about SBI writing off Rs 17,500 crore of NPA of prominent persons was splashed across all major media outlets in the state on November 16, 2016. Out of this, Rs 3,000 crore belonged to Mallya.
The film was submitted for censor certificate in October and a four-member censor committee which watched the film said it would be issued U certificate without any suggestion of cuts. The regional official, however, suggested the removal of Mallya sequence. "Although I have questioned the reason for the suggestion, the official insisted on it and we were forced to make several trips from Thrissur to Thiruvananthapuram in November and December. Finally, I had no option other than agreeing to the suggestion as I needed the certification in 2017 to avoid major financial losses," he said.
According to Narayanan, the film deals with the complex situation of a transgender person, negotiating the life and interacting with society and the how the public consciousness addresses the situation. Describing the treatment meted out to independent film makers by the censor board officialdom as outrageous, Narayanan said his film will be released soon.
