Without letting go of our identity, without forgetting the strength of our soil, without forgetting our roots, we must try to spread our wings and fly higher,” opined actor-director Ramesh Aravind.
Speaking after inaugurating the seminar titled ‘Chandanavana – Then, Now, and Future’ organized today by the Karnataka Film Chamber of Commerce at the Artists’ Association, he said, “After the magic created by K.G.F and Kantara, everyone is looking in one direction. There is a dialogue in the film ‘America America’. One character says that what a human being needs is roots, while another says that what matters are wings for a person to fly. Naturally, the question arises — can’t a person have both wings and roots? That is exactly what is needed now as well.
Without abandoning our identity and without forgetting our roots, we must try to spread our wings and fly higher,” he said. Saying that without cinema our childhood would have been limited to just a geometry box and a rubber ball, Ramesh Aravind said, “It was cinema that showed me the state beyond that. It was cinema that showed me the Himalayas beyond that. It was cinema that showed me a beautiful girl in close-up. The reason we got all these experiences is the magic of cinema. Cinema made us step out of our daily lives. Our state was unified in the 1950s. Even before that, in 1934 itself, unification had begun through cinema. The force that united all Kannadigas was cinema. The reason we are making films today is because of our seniors. Actors such as Rajkumar, Vishnuvardhan, Ambareesh, Shankar Nag, and Anant Nag, along with directors, producers, technicians, and distributors, have all contributed in their own ways. If the Kannada film industry is a huge building, every one of them has worked like a brick in it. Not only that, this chain continues even up to the auto driver who brings a viewer from his home to the theatre. We must salute them all,” he said.
He opined that OTT platforms are the reason Kannada films are reaching every corner of the world and said, “If a boy from Mysuru can make a film with 50 lakh rupees and it reaches Mexico, which is today’s success. Along with that, some problems have also begun. Today’s youth have enormous exposure. This is an era where one says — I learn subtlety by watching Malayalam cinema, I understand what mass means by watching Tamil and Telugu films, I learn marketing strategies from Bollywood, I learn screenplay writing techniques from Hollywood, I understand silence by watching European cinema, I learn editing from YouTube… If youngsters with all this exposure properly use the strength given by our seniors, extraordinary things will happen,” he said.
Saying that now everything can be done through AI, Ramesh Aravind said, “One person made an entire film in nine months with 450 dollars and released it on Amazon Prime Video. If one person can do the work that 100 people would do in 100 days, the reason is AI. A huge lorry called AI is coming at tremendous speed. It cannot be stopped. Nor can we ask people to stand against it. We must intelligently sit in the driver’s seat. We must take control of that lorry and drive it. If we do that, we can reach our destination much faster. That is the only path left. The faster we can adopt AI in our respective fields, the safer we will be,” he opined.
Quoting a line from a novel by Charles Dickens, he said, “At the very beginning of the novel A Tale of Two Cities, it says, ‘this is the best of times; this is the worst of times.’ There is no better time than this, and there is no worse time than this either. This is the season of light; this is the season of darkness. Everything lies before me here, and nothing lies before me here — that is the essence of every era. Not just in our time; even in those days they said the same thing. They will say the same in the future too. That is the truth. Therefore, we must accept it and embrace it,” he said.
