My Friend Who Is A Director, Not A Hero (Yet)!

“You think you are a hero?” asked the English teach incredulously. “Director, actually!” responded Gopi nonchalantly, without breaking a sweat.

It was the communications lab period and one of the students was presenting his essay. The lab was air conditioned and to compound the matter further, it was the period after lunch. Most of us were in post-lunch euphoria and chatting incessantly. As it normally happens, the teacher had to intervene and her ire was directed towards Gopi, who was very much visible with his ‘catchy’ attire. Gopi was flustered that he was the one targeted rather than the entire group and rolled his eyes as he stood up. The teacher was not satisfied with his gesture and cue the first sentence of this blog.

Naturally, Gopi was requested, in very polite terms, to meet our department head to face repercussions for his unruly behavior. This wasn’t new to Gopi who had a ‘good’ working relationship with the department head due to his frequent altercations with the staff.

Gopi, when he started out as an engineering student, was quiet calm in the first year. He was the quintessential last-bencher. However, that changed gradually as the class-mates who he was hanging around with, egged him on to become something more. He evolved so much to a certain stage in the second year that every teacher knew him; for the wrong reasons. He was a regular ‘out-standing’ student in all the teachers’ classes as a result of his incomplete assignments, casual gestures and punchy one-liners.

Something had to give away and sometime during the third year, the class advisor asked Gopi to bring in his father for a one-on-one discussion. His father came that week and visited the class advisor along with Gopi. The meeting happened in the teacher’s cubicle adjoining the electronics lab and I was there with my classmates watching the proceeding behind closed doors. After close to half-hour, Gopi and his father walked out. Gopi was confidently strutting like he had won the Filmfare award and he was waving to us. Inside the class advisor’s cubicle, the teacher looked defeated. I was perplexed. Normally, when your teacher asks to meet your parents, you are doomed (unless you are that scholarship-winning-patent-producing-student-genius!). Gopi explained to us later what happened during the meeting. The class advisor started off with the fact about how Gopi dressed. His father, who is a famous doctor in Namakkal, cut off the teacher mid-sentence and told her, “If the students cannot dress freely during college, then when will they do it? When they are going to office?” The teacher was stunned. Then she countered stating that his son has been frequently bunking classes to which he responded that he was staying home and not loitering around. Am not going to provide the complete transcript of the conversation, because one - it has been more than 10 years since this happened and my memories are vague and two - this is a blogpost and not a novel! Basically, Gopi’s father did a gopi on the teacher, if you know what I mean!

Engineering students have a lot of peculiar habits. One of them is maintaining a single notebook for multiple subjects. Obviously, not all of the teachers were receptive of this culture. Many of my classmates followed this as well, including Gopi. During one class, the teacher asked Gopi to show his notes. Surprisingly, he had written all the topics that the teacher had covered till date. I was thinking to myself, “Maybe this is going to end well!” Apparently, not. The teacher before giving back the note to Gopi casually skipped to the last page and found notes of another subject. This was a teacher who was not part of the receptive group that I mentioned earlier. Her complexion changed and the notebook flying and landed in the middle of the classroom just in front of the blackboard. Gopi just sauntered over to where it was lying and proceeded to dump it in the trash bin at the corner. The enraged teacher took him to the head of the department where a comic scene unfolded. The teacher was standing towards one side of the HOD’s room and Gopi was standing in the opposite end with the department head in the middle. “Why did Gopi disrespect me by throwing the note in the trash bin? Please ask him Sir!” the teacher requested the head. “Please ask her why she threw my notebook first” Gopi countered. The department head then calmed down both of them and resolved the issue.

Gopi also had a keen interest in movies. He had the ability to nitpick even good movies and mention what could have been done better. He would sometimes give us a weirdly different perspective about movies. He would dice a movie and provide interesting information about it. Unfortunately, all of this flew under the radar due to his infamous incidents at the college.

I was worried what would happen to him after he graduated. He never went to the college to receive his degree and instead joined Vijay TV assisting directors in various productions. Later, he developed and directed a web series that received critical reception.

He has directed a film, “Naanum Single Thaan”, a rom-com which will be released once this Covid-19 situation is resolved. Am not sure whether he has plans to become a hero, but he has become a director. He is an example to all the people out there - “Don’t let your mistakes define you!”

I sincerely hope that his first movie is a super-hit.