Sreenivasan: We needed a smuggler with a local name and so we picked Prabhakaran
Reported By 29 Apr 2020
"Prabhakaraa ..." Who would have thought that Thilakan's Ananthan Nambiar's dialog with Karaman Janardanan Nair's Prabhakaran would still have the same shock value as in the 1988 film Pattanapravesham. Sreenivasan certainly not the one who read it!
The dialog of the film was recently stated in Varane Avashyamund by Anoop Sathyan and although the Malayali audience immediately knew the connection to the cult, it offended many in Tamil Nadu as they reportedly thought it was referring to LTTE chief Velupillai Prabhakaran.
Sreenivasan gives us his opinion on the matter. “Our intention was to give a common, naadan name to a smuggler; that was the only thought that went behind the name of Prabhakaran. We never thought about LTTE’s Prabhakaran and when this movie was released in 1988, we had hardly heard about him then. In Kerala, there are so many people named Prabhakaran, but it’s not a common name for a smuggler. It was the same idea when we named Thilakan’s character Ananthan Nambiar in Nadodikattu. I think it’s foolish to misinterpret the reference in Varane Avashyamund to LTTE’s Prabhakaran. If you are forcibly drawing a connection between the film’s Prabhakaran and LTTE leader, then you must also try and find someone named Ananthan Nambiar,” says the veteran actor-scriptwriter.
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