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The Hindu : In 1997 when Huli Chandrashekar was having a beer with film director Pattabhirama Reddy he broached the topic of making a documentary on him. His subject shied away instantly. “No, no,” Pattabhi told him. “I am an ordinary man. Youare going to lose money if you make a film on me.” At this typically “Pattabhic” response, Chandrashekar kept quiet. He drafted a proposal, sought funds from the Department of Information, failed, and decided to go it alone. Meanwhile he shifted the onus of convincing Pattabhi to his daughter Nandana’s shoulders. Finally, Pattabhi agreed (“If you have decided to lose money, what can I do?”), and the “Family Pattabhic” produced the film, with “Family” member Navroze Contractor agreeing to do the camera work. The result is Pattabhi, a two-hour documentary that is a biopic as well as a slice of Indian history. When it is screened tomorrow for the first time, those who never met him will be introduced to a path breaking filmmaker and poet whose greatest achievement lay in how he could inspire creativity in others.The world measures achievement by the number of awards, medals, citations, shawls and sandalwood garlands an individual can garner. In a similarly blinkered fashion, the media refers to Pattabhi only as the director of “Samskara” because (a) it was the first Kannada film to be banned and (b) it later won the President’s Gold Medal. Yes, the radical film on Brahmin hegemony, made in ’69 and based on U.R. Ananthamurthy’s novel, did start a new wave of Kannada cinema. But it did not wholly define the man Pattabhi whose life and work spanned nearly a century (19 February 1919 to 6 May 2006). Chandrashekar’s film fills out the portrait.We come to know the boy Pattabhi, a product of feudal times, living in a mansion in Nellore, fearful of his stern father who used to beat him to make him…More