Kamal Haasan - Renaissance Man

For six decades, art has been his medium and message. Now, Kamal Haasan is leveraging his personal value to steer another all-consuming ambition: Electoral success

- Divya J Shekhar

Neenga Nallavara, Kettavara?” Are you a good person or a bad person?

It’s funny that Kamal Haasan should be asked this question 32 years after he first faced it. In Mani Ratnam’s 1987 film Nayakan, the question triggers protagonist Velu Naicker—a commoner who turns gangster to protect his underprivileged community—to take stock of his entire life. The climactic dialogue was immortalised in Indian cinema, but Haasan, onscreen, had no answer to it. Through a performance that eventually won him a National Award, the audience learns that the existential dilemma posed by the question agonises Velu Naicker till his last breath.

Off-screen, however, Kamal Haasan has more clarity. After 60 years of making more than 200 films in five languages, Haasan believes that he is working towards becoming a good human. “It’s a continuous, everyday process. There is a challenge to that status every day… being a nallavan is a work in progress. It’ll never be complete, but I’ll never quit trying,” he tells this journalist in response to the same question. We’re in Chennai, a week after his 65th birthday on November 7.

Between launching a skill development centre in his hometown Paramakudi near Madurai (because “a school dropout could become Kamal Haasan only by acquiring a few skills”) and charting out expansion plans for his 38-year-old production company Raaj Kamal Films International (while considering himself “just an employee like everybody else, not the owner”), Haasan is also jet-setting to shoot for Indian 2. The film, to be released next year, is both a sequel to his 1996 National Award-winning vigilante drama Indian, and possibly Haasan’s swansong as an actor.