Boy from Children’s Home turns hero

KANNUR: When Kannur district collector Mir Mohammed Ali produced a two-minute video on Kannur, promoting its tourism destinations, it was not just a visual treat but a continuation of his engagement with children from the marginalized sector.
The hero or the narrator of this video that captures the essence of Kannur tourism is an inmate of Children’s Home at Thalassery.
Siva, a Class VII student, was literally the discovery of the collector.
“Since I’m associated with the Children’ Home and familiar with the inmates there, I had a feeling that the narrator of this video should be from that community. We shortlisted a few and asked them to speak before the camera,” said the collector.
To their amazement, Siva performed exceptionally well and he was selected for the video, he said.
“We worked in a tight schedule and completed it in two days, working for almost 40 hours. But Siva was amazingly professional in his acting and he was willing to take up the tasks that are not familiar to him and even dubbed in English,” said the collector, who directed the video.
When he was asked to do kayaking, Siva was ready to take it up and learned it in 10 minutes and behaved like a matured actor, according to the crew members of the project.
Siva, who has his toots in Palakkad but born and brought up in Tamil Nadu, reached the Children’s Home after he lost his parents, said documentary filmmaker Anshad Karuvanchal, who is the project designer of the video.
“While ordinary children have enough chance to express their talent, inmates of Children’s Home do not have any opportunity. Hence, the collector suggested we should identify a new face from the Children’s Home. Now, we feel it was a brilliant decision, same as Mira Nair spotted Shafiq Syed, a slum dweller boy, in the lead role in her film Salaam Bombay,” Karuvanchal said.
Incidentally, the collector’s engagement with the marginalized children is nothing new and he had undertaken many initiatives for tribal students of Government High School at Aralam farm, the tribal resettlement area in the district.
He had even taken them out on picnics and excursion, including air travel, apart from improving the infrastructure of the school.