Chapter 2

It was the time of the early seventies. Two decades into the film industry, I was coming of age. As an established director in Tamil cinema, I had a firm footing in the Tamil industry, and was dabbling in Kannada, Telugu and a bit of Hindi cinema. Parallel cinema was picking up in the Indian industry, and I was doing my bit towards it. It was a great time to be a director in the Indian industry, too many unexplored themes. Many controversial, but potential classics nevertheless. I was in Karnataka, and was working on the storyline of a young beautiful woman, who gave up on all her youth on working for the upliftment of her family, which was clouded under the influence of an alcoholic father, an unemployed brother, and amidst all this, she finds love in a caring boss. The film had been a rip-roaring success in Tamil, and I was planing to remake it in Kannada. The role of the unemployed brother in Tamil had been done by a protege of mine, Rajeev Chandran. Rajeev Chandran had been an National-award winning child actor, and after growing up, his drive to enter the industry pushed him in as an assistant director to my films. Seeing his penchant for dancing, and his skills at Bharatanatyam, Kuchipudi and Kathak, I used him as the choreographer in a couple of movies. While seeing him emote, and reminded once of his acting histrionics, I decided to cast him in small roles in a few movies of mine. What I saw was some wonderful acting, and he had acted in practically every movie of mine in the last 3 years. This coincided with him slowly climbing the ladder of acting stardom, and I was convinced he was the next big thing to happen to Indian cinema. But for the Kannada version, I was looking for a change of cast, and for names that could be more identifiable with the Kannada audience.

In this juncture, I got into a bus. It was the Rajkumar era of Kannada cinema, and I could hear "Yaare Koogadali" from a nearby tea stall. Wonderful song, sung by the great actor I thought. The bus was crowded and I took the last seat. The conductor, a dark, lean man, extremely fast in talking and moving, in a matter of minutes, distributed tickets across the extremely crowded bus, and was at me in a jiffy. "Elli saar?", he asked. "Onnu Majestic", said I. "Tamila saar. It is ondhu here", with a smile on his face. I didn't know why, but he was definitely not the run-of-the-mill guy you meet everyday. There was something extremely attractive about him. Extremely charismatic guy. Then he did something, something which told me the genius that this guy was. The bus had to stop, and he flipped in one stroke, the whistle from behind his hand, straight to his mouth, and man, was it stylish! I'd not seen someone do that before. And in one stroke, he blew the whistle, the bus stopping with a screech.

He went on his usual ticket giving spree and was back in a couple of minutes. I asked him if he had seen "Andha Penn". He told me he did, thrice in the theatre, but did not understand much because of the Tamil involved in it. Though, apparently he loved it. I told him it was my film. He could not believe it, and it took me some convincing to make him believe. For the next fifteen minutes, he was asking me for a chance to act in one of my movies, and wanted to appear for a screen test. I asked him to come to Chennai, and appear for a screen test. Before taking leave, I got his name, which was Raghavendra Rao.

Raghavendra had a close friend, Ravindra Gadde, the driver of the bus in which he was the conductor. Raghavendra, who hailed from a very poor family, couldn't afford a ticket to travel to Chennai. Ravindra, who stood by Raghavendra in his desire to make it big in the film industry, gave him 700 rupees, a month's salary of his, to get started with a career in Chennai. Raghavendra, with those 700 rupees in hand, came to meet me, on the day of Holi, Guru Poornima that year, and embarked on a journey where he'd never be the same again!