First Look: Vikram’s KADARAM KONDAN

 

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Baradwaj Rangan’s Tribute to Kamal Haasan’s Cool

REBIRTH OF THE COOL?

Fifty years into an endlessly fascinating career, here’s a wish (no, make that a pipe dream) that Kamal Hassan would go back to having fun, being cool.

AUG 23, 2009 – IN THE YEARS I WAS GROWING UP in a balmy nook of Madras – ensconced in an ethos that was part-Peter, part-Pattabhiraman – Kamal Hassan was, quite simply, one of the coolest people on the planet. (At the time, of course, the actor was adored by the mononym of Kamalahasan. The modification in the moniker occurred during the release of Vikram, his lavish Bond fantasia, perhaps owing to his attempts to simultaneously straddle the worlds of Tamil and Hindi cinema. He was trying, in other words, to be part-Pattabhiraman, part-Parminder.) Kamal was cool not because he could act well – as a kid or a young teen, it wasn’t exactly the Method-inflected thesping skills that reached out and grabbed me by the collar of my printed-polyester shirts. He was cool because he embodied an imported-from-the-West panache that few Tamil stars had before him, few Tamil stars possess even today.