KOCHI: How would one celebrate, pay homage to someone who etched every known human emotion in all its subtle nuances for many generations in Kerala? Any attempt to assess what Mohanlal means to us will automatically become a commentary on our own ways of making sense of our lives. No other actor has touched the inner recesses of Malayali life with such emphatic precision, courage and tenderness as Mohanlal has.
While he laughed, we too laughed; while he romantically teased Kaarthumpi, we also fondled our romantic fantasies; while he pleaded, “ Sir, is it not possible not to hang me?,” in Chithram, we felt it was we who were walking to the gallows; Grinding his teeth in an insanely murderous frenzy, Sethumadhavan was pointing his shaking knife at the whole society which made him what he was.
Then, he broke down before his forbidding father who was at once love and law, understanding and helplessness, compassion and prohibition. When Sethumadhavan kneeled on the ground breaking into a heart-wrenching cry, the young Malayali audience felt it was their dreams that were shattered; it was their lives that were orphaned by the vagaries of destiny. Remember how sheer comic brilliance was infused with an ineluctable sense of poverty, which was quite Chaplinesque, in Nadodikkattu. How can one forget the dilemma of the hapless Kunhikuttan who was tragically divided between the character and the actor?
And then there are the innumerable characters he played that smack of toxic masculinity, the last one being, of course, the invincible Khureshi-Ab’ram in Lucifer. Among them, Aadu Thoma stands out. Beneath the macho veneer that he wore, there were stifled whimpers of a traumatic child who was destined to put aside all his gifts, to enact the Oedipal drama, to castrate his father by cutting off the sleeves of his white shirt, to fight a futile battle with pedagogy and to finally kneel cathartically at the altar of paternal martyrdom. Yes, Thoma was every young man who walked out of the theatre. Look at the spectrum that is called Mohanlal. There is not even a single character, a single emotional trait that escapes his oeuvre.
Almost everything that he played on screen connects with us or the distinctive Malayali sensibility, so to say. It won’t be an exaggeration to say that the common Malayali man has negotiated his life in all its perplexities, transient joys, visitations of love and hate, of hope and despair through the phenomenon called Mohanlal. So when he turns 60, we tend to take a long breath and blurt out, “ Really?”
Being,at the same time, our greatest actor and greatest star for more than three decades is a daunting oxymoron. But, Mohanlal is precisely that, unobtrusively and unquestionably. He is undoubtedly the most democratic actor I have ever come across. He treats everyone in the set with respect and affability. He is always unfailingly a 'director’s dream', a co-actor’s delight. No overbearing attitudes, no mood swings.
For Mohanlal, this birthday too is just another day. As the cliche goes, “ age is just a number.” I can see him, post Covid, walking into the set and standing before the camera. Everything will look ordinary, routine-like till then. When the director says, “action,” there will be the same magic, the same electrifying transformation that enlivened and enriched our experience in the dark hall for four decades.
When “cut” is called, he will peel off the character and walk to his chair with his charismatic nonchalance. Seeing this enigmatic act of demystification, this shedding the last vestiges of a character at the moment of ‘the cut,’ actor Vishal told me with bated breath, “There is no one like him, I swear!” I too join the encore: “There is no one like him.”