When the land of Omkara was gratified with two Oscars in 2009, one of the recipients, Resul Pookutty paused, panted and then breathed, “I dedicate this award to my country which gave the world a word that precedes silence and is followed by more silence — Om.”
His words did not spring out of the blue. Years before, as a BSc Physics student at MSM College, Kayamkulam, Kerala, he had fancied an almost similar dream. “I wanted to bring the Nobel prize to my country as an astrophysicist. I was always fascinated by physics,” says Pookutty who graduated in 1990. But his affair with physics had its share of hurdles.
“For me mathematics was like an anathema. But I had to study it since it was the subsidiary subject. I even ended up scoring two out of 80 in the first year.” Nevertheless the resolute Pookutty did not give up and scored nearly full marks in the final year. “That was the most splendid moment of my college life. It was then I realised that you could make things happen with your will.” He vividly recalls his dear Rashid Sir who used to explain complex theories of physics in simple Malayalam to a lad who came from a Malayalam medium school and gaped wide at the hard-sounding English terminologies. He proudly recounts how he donned the roles of a student and teacher at the same time. “I taught the juniors at a tutorial college near MSM. It earned me a decent sum. It also brought me up to speed with the syllabus and helped me score very good marks.”
His soaring ambitions around physics soon gave way to a new medium he never thought of before. “I never wanted to be a sound engineer. But that was what destiny had in store for me,” he says. Giving in to his friends’ advice to pursue sound engineering, Pookutty found himself at Film and Television Institute of India, Pune. At the Institute, Pookutty discovered what cinema was. “It was a whole new world before me. Watching the films of great actors, I began to grasp the essential grammar that constituted cinema.” The young Pookutty from a rustic background had to cope with an air that was bustling and teeming with ideas, views and perspectives. He says that he learnt to mould his life out of it and constantly muttered to himself, ‘Never give up’. “On my first day, I was sent to a market, where people spoke nothing but raw, fast-paced Hindi. I just couldn’t communicate and I understood the need to learn languages.”
He calls his days at the institute ‘golden’. “I have never worked in my life towards a definite goal . Yet I believe in working hard. That is something I have learnt from FTII. We always worked together at the institute”
aswin@newindianexpress.com