As soon as Prakash Bare tells you that he was in the United States (U.S.) for 15 years, you wait for that Yankee accent to show up in his conversation. But for a faint emphasis on the ‘r,' Prakash talks in fluent Malayalam and English.
“It all depends on your orientation. In fact, in Silicon Valley, where I worked, some of the American parents used to complain that their children spoke with an Indian accent as many of the teachers hailed from India. I find that many children in India have a more pronounced American accent,” laughs Prakash.
The Bangalore-based techie-turned-producer-turned-actor was in the city for the filming of Ivan Megharoopan , in which he plays the lead role of K.P. Madhavan Nair, a poet. He is co-producing the film with Thampi Antony and Gopa Periyadan.
“The script of the film written by P. Balachandran enthused me to invest in the film. Based on the life of poet P. Kunhiraman Nair, the film is an attempt to capture the essence of the poet and man who lived only by his own rules. It is not an attempt to justify or examine his choices but to portray a man who caught the imagination of a generation of Malayalis,” explains Prakash. Dressed in a dhothi and a loose shirt, Prakash is all set to enact a scene from the film that shows the poet as a young man.
This is the third film that he is acting in after making a splash as Mammooty in Priyanandan's award-winning Sufi Paranja Katha , which Prakash had produced as well. A cameo in M.G. Sasi's Janaki and a character in debutant Shalini Nair's movie, an adaptation of Malayattor's Yakshi followed.
So how did a techie enter tinsel town?
“During my student days in NSS College of Engineering, Palakkad, I made my name as an actor and won several prizes in youth festivals, inter-college competitions and so on. That was when I met theatre activists such as Priyanandnan and M.G. Sasi,” explains Prakash.
But cinema came first into his life as Prakash's father used to run a theatre called Chirakkal Dhanraj in Kannur. “My brother still has a theatre in Kannur. I almost grew up with cinema,” quips Prakash.
Academics took Prakash to IIT Kanpur and work took him to the United States, where “I worked for five years and then set up my own firm GDA Technologies with three friends, I always planned to return to India.” He adds: “In my mind, I was very clear what I was gaining by working in the U.S. and what I was losing.”
Connecting with theatre
Prakash returned to India and settled in Bangalore and soon reconnected with literature, his alumni association (of which he is the president), and became active on the theatre circuit as well. Waiting for Godot was one of the first plays that he staged in Bangalore, Thiruvananthapuram and Kozhikode.
In the meantime, Priyanandan approached him with a script for Sufi.. . “I read the script and I felt that this was a movie that should be made. We approached several leading actors to play that role. But many of them did not have the dates to commit to the film. That was when K.P. Ramanunni, author of the book on which the film Sufi was based, and scenarist of the film, felt I could essay the character,” explains Prakash. He adds that he was cast in Ivan Megharoopan also due to the difficulty in finding an actor who had the time to keep aside for the movie. But more than seeing his name in the credits as an actor, Prakash makes it clear that he aspires to be part of a movement for good cinema.
At a time when producers with a sense of aesthetics and sound business sense are in short supply in Malayalam cinema, Prakash is much in demand. But commercial success is not his goal. “My aim is to make movies that get selected to festivals such as Cannes. It is not an impossible task. The technical and creative talent exist. We have to make films that appeal to an international audience and not look at local markets alone.”
He feels that verbosity in Malayalam cinema has to make way for narrative visuals and there has to be proper budgeting that takes into account the viability of a film and its production.
“If you study the economics of cinema, it is easy to grasp that films with mega budgets cannot recover the money given the present situation. The trick is to make movies that follow excellent production values without bankrupting the producer. One has to raise the bar so much so that our movies automatically have an international audience and market,” says Prakash. As far as Prakash is concerned, the accent is on excellence.
Scene of action
We are trying to get together a group of likeminded people in cinema. V.K. Prakash, Jayaprakash Kuloor, and I have formed a theatre group called Bangalore Theatre Forum. We plan to take the stories or plays of greats such as Chekov, Tagore and Basheer and stage those in English. We cannot change the audience, we have to reach out to them. We plan to do intense plays but ones with humour, action and life. The attention span of the audience has decreased and not many would be willing to sit through a two-hour play. Our intention is to have short plays of 20- to 30-minutes and stage one play or two or three such plays. The first show will be sometime in July-August in Bangalore, and then we will take them to other metros and stage the plays in Kerala too. Actors like Padmapriya have expressed their interest in theatre. The idea is not to make money but to enjoy and support various social causes. For instance, set apart some assistance for victims of endosulphan.
