CHENNAI: They are from different fields and belong to different cities but they both followed their heart over economic comfort. The 51st edition of The Bliss Catchers by AVIS Viswanathan held at Odyssey, Adyar, on Saturday, featured its 100th Blisscatcher, heritage lover Madhusudhanan Kalaichelvan, and the 101st guest, actor Karthik Anantharaman.
New Delhi-based Karthik left his cushy corporate job at a Finnish company after enrolling in a theatre workshop — a fact that he revealed he had hidden from his parents under the guise of a personality development workshop at the time — and pursued theatre and acting.
US-based Madhusudhan had just come back from America in 2010 when he was approached by someone to teach at a college because “I had a degree in architecture. When I inquired further about the college, I found out that it hadn’t even been built yet.” Yet this did not deter the history buff, who joined the college despite having no prior experience in education.
Karthik, too, took the leap into unfamiliar territory by shifting from New Delhi to Chennai, despite not knowing anyone in the city. He wanted to tap into both the Tamil and Malayalam markets, but was filled with uncertainty, nevertheless. For Madhusudhanan, his tenure as the professor for the History of Architecture course led to the fusion of his two passions, and after holding a seminar on the Srirangam temple for the Tamil Heritage Trust, he found the courage to conduct more seminars on history and architecture.
The two speakers described what ‘bliss’ meant to them, which tied into the concepts of thedal (search) and thagam (thirst) that constitute the emotion, according to happynesswala Viswanathan.
For Madhusudhanan, it is the preceding hunt for knowledge before a talk. “I learned more as a teacher than as a student. For me, the process of researching and learning more about something, and then producing that to others, is bliss,” he said. For Karthik, the process of immersion into a role is bliss. “I surrender to every job I do. Left up to me, I would to nothing — it’s the most pleasured, meditative zone. That’s the joy of surrendering — losing Karthik to acting or to writing. I want to lose myself in all that I do,” he said.