Qalandar

REBIRTH OF THE COOL?

Fifty years into an endlessly fascinating career, here’s a wish (no, make that a pipe dream) that Kamal Hassan would go back to having fun, being cool.

AUG 23, 2009 – IN THE YEARS I WAS GROWING UP in a balmy nook of Madras – ensconced in an ethos that was part-Peter, part-Pattabhiraman – Kamal Hassan was, quite simply, one of the coolest people on the planet. (At the time, of course, the actor was adored by the mononym of Kamalahasan. The modification in the moniker occurred during the release of Vikram, his lavish Bond fantasia, perhaps owing to his attempts to simultaneously straddle the worlds of Tamil and Hindi cinema. He was trying, in other words, to be part-Pattabhiraman, part-Parminder.) Kamal was cool not because he could act well – as a kid or a young teen, it wasn’t exactly the Method-inflected thesping skills that reached out and grabbed me by the collar of my printed-polyester shirts. He was cool because he embodied an imported-from-the-West panache that few Tamil stars had before him, few Tamil stars possess even today.

An older generation would swear by the devil-may-care swagger that a Sivaji Ganesan brought to his chain-smoking while crooning Yaar andha nilavu in Shanti, with the graceful shrug of the shoulders that drew the arms close to the torso, and with the attendant gesture of the upturned limp wrist, suggesting the futility of fighting fate – but the deliberations behind these mannerisms never held much appeal for me. When, years afterwards, I stumbled into these artifacts of yesteryear cool (primarily through the graces of Oliyum Oliyum), there was always a fourth-wall-shattering distance – the affectations weren’t organic. They needed to be viewed by squinting through a mist of nostalgia and indulgence. The great actor may well have been attempting to mimic an American college-goer from the mid-century, employing exclamations such as “swell” and “rad” and “golly gee” – it just wasn’t our times, it just wasn’t us.

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