May 16,2018
Veteran filmmaker Adoor Gopalakrishnan, who in his glittering career
extending close to five decades has won 16 National Awards so far, finds the new
craze of selfies a disaster.
The 76-year-old was here at The Nehru
Memorial Museum Library for a discussion on "Revisting Ray", a conference and
exhibition on the filmmaker, on Wednesday along with filmmaker Amol Paleker.
Recollecting few incidents, Gopalakrishnan pointed out out a lack of
decorum.
"I might be unfamiliar with social media but one thing I find is
a big disaster is 'selfies' . It is impossible. Once someone kept asking for a
selfie, so I stood. But then he kept his hand on my shoulder which I had to
remove and scolded him... I said, 'How can you behave like this? Are you my age?
We are not even friends.'," he said.
Citing another example of a young
mediaperson who kept chasing him for a byte during a film festival in the
captial, Gopalakrishnan higlighted the ignorance of people today.
"During
one of the film festivals that took place at the Siri Fort auditorium, there was
a group of people who waited for a byte. That time I did not even know what a
byte is. I kept running away, avoiding them and by the end, there was one girl
who was determined for a byte, so I thought why disappoint her.
"I made
sense from her question and gave her an answer for the same. While leaving, in
the end she asked me what is my name," narrated the filmmaker, much to the
audience's amusement.
"That is the new media. They don't use their mind,
they only want to ask what do you feel about this or this," said Gopalakrishnan.