Kannada actresses take centrestage

 After Malayalam actresses like Keerthy Suresh, Anu Emmanuel and Sai Pallavi who are making waves in T-town, now, it is the turn of Kannada actresses like Samyuktha Hegde (‘Kirrak Party’) and  Neha Shetty (‘Mehbooba’) to hog the limelight with big ticket movies. It surely seems to be a good time for lasses from the SandalwoodState to showcase their talent in the Telugu film industry where the exposure and the moolah is the best in all the four southern film industries, going by industry assessments. 

Earlier, in the past decade or so, we have had pretty women such as Pranitha Subhash, Nanditha  Shwetha, Haripriya and Divya Spandana who were also featured along with leading stars in our films. Then there was Pooja Hegde (Duvvada Jagannadham) who is originally from Hindi films, though having Kannada roots. She has films with biggies like Prabhas and Bellamkonda Srinivas.   

The relatively lesser trickle of talent from Kannada filmdom has been noted over time even though their talented stars like Saroja Devi, Jayanthi and Malashri have been famous in our parts of the country too. 

The reasons are manifold: their films have just about come into a league of their own, given their tendency to go in for Tamil, Telugu or Hindi remakes regularly and also severely impeded by  a lesser market for exhibition outside their state. 

Yet, the similarity is that the public craves too mcuh for masala as much as our formula flick fans. In fact, the latest release ‘MLA’ starring Kalyan Ram and Kajal Agarwal is based out of Bengaluru and its IT environs even as the rest of the characters are shown in a village in Anantapur district which is close to the Silicon city. 

With more opportunities arising, there can be more films remade or posited in the neighbouring state, which has always been a huge and a familiar market for the other three film industries. A small factoid to end the story: Over 110 films have been remade from Kannada into many languages including Odia and Bengali over the past four decades and more.

Undoubtedly, Pooja Hegde is leading the pack followed by other Kannada divas. They are bound to create waves, if  their releases rock the box-office, since irrespective of the language they belong, an actress with a hit in her kitty will sign more films in Telugu.