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Our Gift to amma on my birthday – Thanks Lalettan and Ajayan

By vinodnarayan on June 15, 2014 • ( 0 )

I usually don’t wish people on their Birthday… I do wish at times as a courtesy and the reason is simple… I believe we don’t do anything towards our birth; the people we should be indebted to is to our mom and dad…. So it should be their parents whom we should wish…. And not always you know the parents…. That means we should also pat our back when it is our Kid’s birthday and we should present something to our living parent on our birthday…

And May 30^th was my birthday and we wanted to give mom something that she can remember and give my birth a meaning that I cannot give in a life time…. That is when I heard that my friend Ajayan Venugopal was doing the dialogues for an upcoming Mohanlal starrer…. For those non Malayali’s who might not know Mohan Lal… he is one of the finest actors who is still gracing the silver screen of world cinema…..

Mohan Lal stands as a tower in the top 50 actors in IMDB who have given mind blowing performances… he stands above the likes Kamal Hassan, Antony Hopkins, Morgan Freeman, John Wayne, Dustin Hoffman, Tom Hanks and many more….. Read the list here.. And read his wiki page here.. I agree that lists have their own landscape… But for a Malayali Mohan Lal sits on the pinnacle of any list of acting,….. and another list that lists the 10 best actors in all languages He is Number 1 : ) Here is the link

When Ajayan said come over, I planned the trip on my birthday but then something came up…. then thanks to my wife she said we should make it…. always women know what best to do…. we men turn out to be dumb and just need to accept it at times… So when that conversation came again I said yes and made it this weekend….. Amma meeting Lalettan (How we Malayalees call Mohan Lal) was the most happiest moment in my life… there are some moments in life that make you feel complete.. this was one…. I remember feeling the same when amma got a chance to sit next to Amol Palekar and travel from pune to Bangalore…. but there we did not do anything and that was just accidental…. But here it happened due to someone I knew as part of my small life…. and that is a very happy moment in need…

I thought our gift to her will end with a quick meeting… but today when we met lalettan; he asked where amma was… I said she is sitting in the car…. He said why so and walked with me to meet amma and hugged her… She told him you are like my son and to that he replied…. “ why do you say like, Am I not your son…” Later in a conversation he said… “When we pass an age every mother is our mother…” I know skeptics will say he is an actor… but I am intelligent enough to know the difference between being an actor and being human… : )

Beyond that it is a very beautiful philosophical point on life… our age levels a lot of things that we would have treated differently in our life….. and when he said that, I remembered Milan Kundera’s insights in “Ignorance” where the protagonist says…. “The average age limit of our species is what defines us…. If the average age limit of a human was 180 years then our relationships, approach to love, our being and sheer existence all would have a different meaning….

When lalettan said that I also figured that for the said age limit that our species has, lalettan through his down to earth behavior makes people feel so good that a lifetime just passes in a moment uncontrolled but gripped in a true sense of being…. Thanks Lalettan for being what you are and for the moments you gave…..

There are so many master craftsmen and Towers of their trade… but of many I have met lalettan stands so tall… and when it comes to tall there is another thing I want to share… Last time I met Lalettan was in 1986 or so when I was doing my 9^th grade and he had a shooting location near my school… that day when I stood next to him he was so big, huge.. and today after 28 years…. I had become taller and had put on more weight…. but he still looked like he was young.. and even more younger at heart…. Laletta, life pulsates around you, just like how it does around our mom…. I dedicate this post to our mother and to Lalettan who made the day….