Imagine being feted on a grand stage for your efforts. You are escorted on to the stage, even as the applause for you renders the carefully chosen music for the occasion a mere feeble drone. You bow to the dignitary gracing the event with folded hands, before he reaches out to clasp hands with you. You begin to wonder if there's a word to describe a feeling beyond the most awesome rhapsody that grips you as he grips your hand. You are shown to the exquisite chair at the centre of the stage and requested to take your seat. The clapping of hands has gone on uninterrupted. You sit down and try to glimpse the audience, as you thank them with a bow, but your tears only let you see blobs in place of the individuals. The dignitary wraps an elegant shawl round your shoulders. Then, he garlands you with a necklace of wood shavings that have the scent of sandalwood. He hands you a bouquet, then the memento - a well-crafted wooden carving also wafting the scent of sandalwood, and joins the applauding crowd to intensify the moment further, and you struggle to drink it in.
A few days later, your beloved sibling comes home, eager to congratulate you on the deserved recognition. You tell her the tale of that triumphant tryst, and then show her the photographs and the video of the event, though not necessarily to corroborate your own words. Then, you show her the artifacts from the award ceremony. She hugs you on seeing the memento. She nudges you into a chair, and mimics the dignitary's actions, as witnessed in the video a few minutes earlier. As the necklace of wood is hooped around your neck, on its way, it passes by your nose, without your sense of smell being tingled. This despite the care you had taken to shield it from the air. Once she has handed you the memento, you instinctively place it on the table next to you, and take a whiff of your palms. You inhale the aroma of clean skin, and your shoulders drop, and so also your eyes, as you shake your head in disappointment. Both the shavings and the carving had only been dabbed with sandalwood oil. You are searching for a word again, one that conveys a mix of anguish, embarrassment and annoyance.
I admit that this is a bit of a stretch, but you do feel a similar disappointment having raved about a Kannada movie that delighted you, only for your Tamil or Telugu speaking friend, having listened to the drift of the plot or the tunes of the songs, to point out that you were only watching a remake. You log on to YouTube to show them the trailer, a few scenes or the song, only for them to tell you that the actors are merely aping the performers in the original. What more, even the scenic locations that had floored you, you learn, were not scouted by the makers of the movie you watched. They were merely shooting at the sites shown in the original. That the tunes were actually created keeping in mind the inherent cadence of different language tone down your contempt for the lyricist and his inane penning. You couldn't cavil about the singers' diction either, as those who had hummed in the original had been roped in at exorbitant prices, in spite of not knowing Kannada.
Some months down the line, you read in the papers that the movie has been picked by the Karnataka Government as the best movie of the year, and the lead actors have walked away with the acting awards. To make matters worse, the music director gets rewarded for his "inspired" work.
The movie that is adjudged to be the runner-up is an art movie, released but in a handful of cinema halls despite being an entrant at a few global film festivals. It is a celluloid adaptation of a timeless novel authored by one of the most distinguished Kannada writers ever. The music director is not a household name, but his score serves the cinema well. The lyricist draws on the author's work to transport listeners into the contemplative world offered by the author. The actors are predominantly stage performers, little-known to the masses. The director is, for his own good a humble man, or he would be devastated by the trickle of acclaim coming his way. His National Awards have no power to bestow on him any celebrity. And it doesn't matter that his movies get remade. Cinema enthusiasts did flock the few halls that screened the movie, but the motley group of producers who had chipped in to turn the director's vision into a motion picture could not pool in any more money to widen the distribution. And even as they evaluated their options, the movie that won the state award was released, evicting their own cinema from even the few halls that they had managed to lease. The hero, after all, was a superstar. And his heroine, a fresh import into the Kannada industry, one who made up for her ignorance of Kannada by unabashedly enticing on screen.
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