With his golden voice and dulcet tone, P C Ramakrishna charms Vidya Singh as he discusses his 40,000 voice recordings and theatre in the city.
Beginnings
I did my schooling in Kolkata and graduated from Loyola College in Chennai.
I went to North India to work, but felt the need to be back in Chennai as this is where most of my interests were — theatre, and music. I worked with a corporate group for 25 years, till I took early retirement in 1993. The voice work that had been my hobby became too big; it became a profession, a full time job. It interested me more than a 9-5 job. I read scripts for documentaries, corporate films and children’s talking books. In the evening I do theatre, just for the love of it.
The Voice
Doordarshan and the black and white TV started in 1976. I was already doing talk shows on All India Radio. I also became one of the newscasters along with Jayanti Nataraj and Shashi Menon. I did that for seven years between 1976 and 1983 and I was paid a princely sum of Rs 75 per read. I read news not for the pay, but for the pleasure and responsibility.
Around this time corporate films became strong.
People who wanted to say something were making a film about it and someone had to read the script. The spoken word fascinates and motivates me. I love to pronounce words and this propels me.
I protect my voice
I don’t eat ice cream, it also helps that I don’t like ice cream. I drink only room temperature liquids and am careful with food. I avoid spicy food. I know what affects my voice. Silence works for me as well. I speak with a neutral accent and most of the work of The Madras Players is Indian. We train ourselves to speak with an unaccented, neutral, idiomatically and syntactically correct English.
Theatre
I did a lot of plays during my school days. When I returned to Chennai, Ammu Mathew who started The Madras Players met me at one of the college productions and invited me to read for them in 1969. I am one of the older members of the group now. I was the president for twenty years after she passed away. I have been with the players for 40 years.
The Indian connection
During the 60s and 70s, we did a lot of American, European and English theatre.
Around the mid-70s, four writers from the four corners of India began to get translated. There was Girish Karnad, Badal Sarcar, Mohan Prakash and Vijay Tendulkar. We performed a huge body of their work. The audiences were growing because of the Indian idiom and we realised that our USP lay there.
Then from the 90s, people began writing in English. Today most of our work is in English.
Multimedia theatre
Gowri brought in the multimedia concept, by adding music and dance to the productions and our vista enlarged. We now have in our latest production, Priyadarshini Govind, Anjana Anand and Narendra dancing, TM Krishna singing and Gowri who is the grand daughter of Kalki.
Love of acting
Yes that’s what I do; it’s the adrenaline rush to be on stage. It has given me the opportunity to play so many characters.
We rehearse for about three months and I get under the skin of the character and often find it difficult to get out of it! I play my age and in the role become the character. When I play a traumatic role, I am unable to shake it off. I give my wife full credit for having lived with me for so many years and having dealt with this. Some roles do traumatize you. There is no disconnect, you cannot let go. Theatre does that to you. I can translate the vision of the director on stage, and I think I do that reasonably well.
Inspiration
The spoken and written word jumps out at me. I am terrible at mathematics, but the word and characters fire me. The sound of the word always moves me. I would love to do theatre and as long as I can stand on the stage I will continue.
I have a passion for music and have performed the mridangam professionally at the Music Academy.