Battling superstition with love

The boneless wonder Prabhu Deva, who has entertained Indian film audiences for nearly three decades since his mind-blowing debut in 1993 with 'Gentleman' has donned many a hats in this period. The sweep of his role plays range from being a dance floor assistant to being a reputed director in Tamil, Telugu and Hindi. In between these two ends, he has also acted in multi-lingual films cleverly playing to his strengths and making a great show of it.

Remaking a Dileep blockbuster 'Kalyanaraman' released in 2002, the Telugu version ' Kalyanaramudu' was released in 2003, within seven to eight months of the original's release. The genre being romantic comedy into which Malayalam heroes Dileep and Kunchacko Boban were snug fits, the makers of the Telugu movie, S P Entertainments had calculated pretty well, it would work well with a middle-level set of heroes. So enter Venu Thottempudi, who had begun to be noticed after his hit film 'Hanuman Junction' and of course, the 'Muqqala Muqqabla' star Prabhu Deva too.

The film's theme in which strangely women married into the hero's family are doomed to die young and how true love triumphs (despite delivering its own share of tensions and shocks to the couple in love) at the end reads like an one-liner narrative but the original was a blockbuster and enabled the remake too to enjoy a decent run. Directed by G Ram Prasad, who had four releases in the first decade of the new millennium would be content with this film as the others did not leave behind too much of an impact. Interestingly, Venu had already featured in one of his earlier films ' Chiru Navvutho' released in 2000.

Music director Mani Sharma, who still enjoys a brand value in Telugu cinema, was the tunesmith for the film in which he retained the tunes of most of the original's audio tracks. The remaining stars of the movie range from the veterans J V Somayajulu to Allu Ramalingaiah who plays the hero's grandfather to established character artistes like Nasser and M S Narayana making it a complete ' family package'.

Quite notably, in the first three years of the current millennium, there were 12 remakes from Kerala and two heroes – Dileep and Mohanlal – from its backwaters were hot favourites of distant Andhra film makers who seemed to like their understated, yet assertive characterisations onscreen in many genres which comprised comedy and action majorly.

Statistically speaking, there were 7 remakes of these two heroes between 2000-03. It's a different matter that Lal is still much sought after as many of his recent releases are eagerly being nativised by heroes of the stature of megastar Chiranjeevi in Hyderabad. The much-awaited Dasara release ' Godfather' of Chiru is one such example.