Murugan—the master of many camera tricks
THIRUVANANTHAPURAM: M Murugan is a familiar name for photographers and media professionals. He has been running MS Engineering Works near Sastham Kovil temple, Manacaud, for nearly 30 years now. Murugan is an expert mechanic in repairing tripods, monopods, camera sliders, glidecams, steadicam, and jibs. This makes him the go-to guy for photographers and visual artists.What makes Murugan different from others? Maybe the fact that he manufactures parts of the camera accessories on his own. While others don’t take up the work owing to unavailability of spare parts, Murugan makes them on his lathe, welds and fixes it to the accessory. Murugan started his career at the age of 18 from a shop at Pulimoodu run by four brothers.
“One of them was specialised in repairing tripods, the other better at photography accessories. The rest were proficient in welding, lathe work and autorickshaw fare meter repairing. So I could study a bit of everything,” says Murugan. He chose to specialise on repair of tripods and accessories, and later worked in Coimbatore, Bengaluru and Chennai to master the work before opening his shop in the city. He shifted his focus to repairing autorickshaw fare meters nearly 10 years ago. “I had to wind up when the meters were upgraded to electronic ones. Though I completed training for repairing electronic meters, I was denied the certificate,” adds Murugan. This forced him to move back to fixing cameraaccessories.
“Five years back when I restarted, I had around 10 customers. Now, I have around 600 across the state,” he says. People frequently come from districts like Idukki, Ernakulam and Kollam to get service for their equipment. “Though there is a mechanic in Kottarakara, people often come to me as I manufacture the parts. Another work I take is setting up mobile phones and fixing monitors on tripods and monopods.”
Murugan says he is not very active on social media, but going digital has been good for his business. Murugan opens his shop around 9am and closes by 7pm. “My only motto is to finish the work on time and make the customer happy.” Though his revenue depends on the work he gets, he earns around `15,000 per month. However, the lockdown period tested him too. “Weddings and programmes were cancelled. Even TV channel employees weren’t coming to shop for repairs. Some ongoing and pending projects fetched me `8,000. I survived three months with that,” he adds. Murugan says it’s difficult to get staff for his shop as very few people have the patience for the work.