Kamal Haasan’s vanity fair

Kamal (TOI Photo)Seven is considered a very lucky number in our entertainment business. Sushmita Sen loves no 7. In fact she has so many of them in her cellphone numbers that I get dizzy dialling this one digit.
Seven is also Kamal Haasan���s birth date. I went through a traumatic marital breakup with him (his not mine), saw him go through a tumultuous relationship with a starlet that lasted just about a year.
Then he met the lovely actress Gautami who���s been an inherent part of his life and home for five years now.Haasan adopted Gautami���s daughter as his own. He has seen Gautami through a serious illness. And she, I think has seen him through a fatal malady. Promiscuity.
Like all Scorpios, Kamal is an extremely passionate man with an exacerbated appetite for life���s most forbidden fruits . When he loves he loves with a hurricane���s ferocity. When he acts he doesn���t care about cost or health. The targets in his mind aren���t numbers. They are far more cumbersome goals to be realised at any cost.
Sadly he has become like his mentor Shivaji Ganesan in the way he likes to hog the limelight in his movies. While he went through the turbulence of a restless body and soul he saw his two lovely daughters grow into endearing replicas of their mom and dad. Shruti and Akshara have inherited their father���s intellect and their mother Sarika���s looks.
Kamal is one of the funniest and most fun persons I���ve ever met. He���s self-educated and therefore well-informed. He can talk unselfconsciously and extensively on any subject. But when it comes to cinema he can hold forth for hours.
On screen he has become a bit of a limelight-moth. The signs of a creative megalomania have been creeping up on Kamal for a long time. His new film Dasavtharam has him in 10 roles. That���s one-up on his mentor Shivaji Ganesan who had played nine roles in a Tamil film. Truly ���Ravan���ous actors with a massive appetite for excesses, both Shivaji and Kamal.
Why 10 roles? Isn���t it a little self-defeating to give the audience an over-dose of genius? Everything about Dasavtharam looks over-blown... and we aren���t talking about Mallika Sherawat here. Why was she sucking up to Jackie Chan and ignoring others? What was she trying to prove that she hobnobs with the globe?
Attracting optimum eyeballs has become a sickness at celebrity events. Everyone is desperate to get a mention on page 3. But why Kamal Haasan, for God's sake! He ended up looking like a prop at his own ball.
For all outward appearances the Dasavatharam music function indicated the way popular entertainment is heading in this country. Have the truly committed popular-artistes sold out beyond redemption? Composer Pritam Chakraborty who has tuned such deeply emotional songs as In dino dil mera and Tum se hi is sad about being recognised and feted for his rumbustious Bhangra tracks. ���There���s no room for gentle persuasion. It���s all all about hard-selling your product,the harder the better. It���s like being in a constant state of sexual arousal. You can't afford one relaxed retrospective moment because the spouse might desert you. The pounding pulsating beat not just predominates, but presides over entertainment today.���
That description goes aptly with Kamal Haasan���s music release. At one time he used to be truly deeply and intensely committed to cinematic excellence. Today, he���s concerned only with the bigness of the product.
Yes, size matters. But what happened to the sighs? Are those lingering whispers and hushed glances that punctuated the noisy assertions of popular entertainment things of the past? It may seem that way. But the daredevils haven���t died. They just don���t know how to market their audacity.
A one-time television actor Kumar Bhatia has just completed a film called Seven about seven blind children who are trained to triumph in tap dancing.
Bhatia didn���t have to do this. Instead of seven blind children learning tap dancing he could���ve made a film about seven pole dancers competing to see whose knicker is the shortest. But Bhatia worked relentlessly with the kids two of them ill with cancer, and has come away with much more than just a film.
What, pray tell, has Kamal come away with from Dasavatharam? Vanity for an actor is the most damaging panacea. It stunts your growth. It defeats your vision. I feel actors need to grow beyond their self-worth. It���s only then that Ajay Devgan makes U Me Aur Hum and Naseeruddin Shah does two-minute walk-on parts in Mithya and Bombay To Bangkok, not to prove he���s beyond footage. But because friends asked him to. As simple as that.