KOCHI: An anarchist all the way. A poet who always rebelled against the establishment. Ayyappan celebrated life to the fullest. His bohemian lifestyle made him stand out from the rest. The so-called intellectuals mocked at him, but little did he bother.
“A man with a political insight in his life, that was he,” recalls Odesa Sathyan, who filmed the life and vision of A Ayyappan through a beautifully made 48-minute documentary ‘Ithrayum Yatha Bhagam’ (The journey so far).
Interestingly, the incidents surrounding the creation of the documentary gave birth to another work - ‘Lives Less Ordinary’- a one-hour documentary by Sudhi Narayan. Here, Ayyappan and Jennifer, Sathyan’s wife, confess their love. “It was a kind of a shock for us when the three of them - Ayyappan, Sathyan and Jennifer - sat together. The poet confessed to his love for Jennifer,” Sudhi said.
Odesa Sathyan believes the Malayali psyche will never be able to understand the politics of the life that Ayyappan had. “Each moment, every day, and each shot was a struggle for me when I shot for the documentary. Ayyappan is a man who cannot be contained within the frames of a camera. Keeping him disciplined for the film was the biggest challenge. We never knew where he would be at the time of the shot, will he turn up at the right moment, or in what state he would be. He stayed with me for two years at my place, which made us, too, sharing the stress in his life,” Sathyan remembers.
Better known for his bohemian lifestyle than his symbolic poetry among many, Ayyappan never dreamt about winning awards or honours. The so-called intellectuals kept him away as a drunkard, but unlike many of them, he never fell for awards. His poems would always remain for the intense way of poetry-telling.
“I thought of making a documentary on Ayyappan not because I admired his poems. I knew him as a close acquaintance of John Abraham. It was his way of reciting poems which first attracted me. As an individual, he had always fascinated me. An open mind and a rebel in his views. He was a man without parallel,” Sathyan says.
“I still remember, when we screened the documentary at Kathmandu, Ayyappan’s poems attracted quite a lot of people there,” he adds.
He was the poet. The poet of anarchy.
Ayyappan celebrated his life; and his death, too.