Why I fancy Mr Prasad

I am a fan of Krishna Prasad. He has a flair for picking telling things to write about. And, he really got down to the root of it in his latest Deccan Herald edit-page column. Mr Prasad refers to a screening of ‘Beru’ in Shimoga. The award-winning Kannada film wasn’t evidently much of a hit. The Shimoga show reportedly attracted an audience of two. Yes, there were just two persons in the hall.
It’s the kind item that sets one thinking (now, do you sense why I fancy Mr Prasad?) The column prompted me to read up on ‘Beru’. Must clarify here, I am unfamiliar with the Kannada film scene; am even less familiar with the language. But then the Beru theme is provocative, and you wouldn’t need to know the language to get the drift of storyline. Maybe corruption is a theme about which pretty much everything had been said before, in the media and cinema, but not everyone has said it. What appeals to me about ‘Beru’ is that it’s a co-operative endeavour of Karnataka film artists and technicians. It was Mithra Chitra’s third film, after ‘Munnudi’ and ‘Athithi’.
P Seshadri-directed Beru’ portrays the degradation of values in the bureaucratic system, and the impact on common man, of a corrupt, insensitive and indifferent administration, says R G Vijayasarathy. For more on his Rediff.com review click here.