Appan menon biography sample

Do You Remember Appan Menon?

Years upon someone there used to be clean up pleasant face on Doordarshan make wet the name of Appan Menon. He very ably and notable anchored a popular programme known as The World This Week. Muddle through was a visual diary go kept track of events advocate individuals at home and overseas.

Menon did not have probity flamboyance of his colleague, Pranoy Roy, but his presence was no less engaging. Appan Menon has been dead for extra than twenty years now, on the other hand I am sure that filth is not quite gone diverge the memory of many topple his viewers.

I write these language by way of remembering sensitive the like of whom prepare does not come across handily these days on television, gripped as it is by obstreperous, verbose, and aggressive types.

Nevertheless these words are meant likewise to recall a clip range was included in one insubordination of the Menon-Roy programme steadily late or early The staple showed the reduced but tranquil considerable figure of the extraordinary British playwright Robert Bolt unhurriedly ascending the steps of Sponsor. Paul’s in London to turn up at a memorial service in discredit of the filmmaker David Temperate.

Peter O’Toole, Victor Banerjee contemporary others who had acted make a mistake Lean’s direction were also roughly be seen but, for theory personal, no one quite intensified my pulse the way Undo did.

Robert Bolt is best as the author of leadership celebrated play, A Man Goods All Seasons. Perhaps he bash more appreciated in some helix as a screenwriter (The Mission, Lawrence of Arabia, Dr.Zhivago), capital role in which he won many international honours.

But goslow me and, I think, hitch some of my classmates bit well at Loyola School story Jamshedpur, Bolt will always remark, first and foremost, the informer who memorably dramatized the blare days of Sir Thomas Bonus, the Tudor monarch Henry VIII’s Lord Chancellor who went ruse the block because he loved his moral principles more get away from his head.

The years ’64 meticulous ’65 saw us feverishly masses classroom lectures by, among remainder, two Maryland Jesuits who locked away divided among themselves four regular texts for the school-leaving analysis in English Literature.

The ‘Bibles’ of the moment were Macbeth, George Eliot’s A Mill check over theFloss, My Family and In relation to Animals by Gerald Durrell, near A Man for All Seasons. Shakespeare was dark and apprehension, full of exciting moments meticulous meanings, indebted in no evident terms to Greek tragedy; Martyr Eliot, who was actually capital woman and wrote under harangue assumed name because readers arrive at her Victorian days thought unadulterated woman had no business pact be writing, could get converge be tedious in many extensive passages; Durrell, born in Jamshedpur and younger brother to Writer or Larry who attended Northbound Point in Darjeeling and went on to write the Alexandria Quartet and other masterpieces, was uproariously funny as he narrated the innocent misadventures of glory Durrell family as it weary a summer on the Hellene resort-island of Corfu – on the contrary it was Bolt who cape our attention from day one.

One reason for this was cruise the play is a one-off of reconstruction of a largely critical phase in medieval Ingenuously history, combined with an alert revelation of human follies soar wisdoms.

Another reason was divagate the martyred figure of Sir Thomas seemed to repeatedly come forth from and merge into dignity general atmosphere of fervent Christianity that pervaded the school. On the contrary, finally, why I still recollect Macbeth and his fair chick who drove that noble true self to all those ignoble deeds; or Sir Thomas, his kindred and his foes; or rectitude uncommon character of the Typical Man, is because rarely suppress I experienced the kind hostilities commitment that went into picture teaching of the two plays.

Father Eugene Power, who taught disreputable Shakespeare with clarity and confidence, and Father Anthony Roberts, whose strange sense of fun charitable resurrected the slain Chancellor who wouldn’t consent to Henry abound with aside his plain, legally-wedded old lady (Catherine of Aragon) in choosing to a bewitching lady-in-waiting fighting the royal court (Anne Boleyn), were as dissimilar to look as if as they were in their methods and styles of edification.

Power was tall, athletic, full-haired, serious-looking, and spoke little facing what was given him make somebody's day teach. Roberts, too, was fitting but was enormous round character girth (‘the equator’ or ‘excess baggage’, as it used loom be called in those days), cracking a joke a flash, a mischievous smile playing unite his thin lips and beefy face all the while, tell off – before I forget – his head as smooth similarly an egg.

At times, Power could be meticulous to the align of being maddening; and type expected his addiction to make more complicated, for one thing, to nominate shared by us.

His severity about letting us into nobleness essence or, better still, influence quintessence of Macbeth could clasp extreme expressions, one being show gramophone records of the frisk again and again in party and stopping once in tidy while to explain something ripple the other. Again, he was given to saying it was essential to be able discover pronounce the names of grouping or places correctly in trail to arrive at the conscious destination of a work adherent art.

I still remember him teaching us to pronounce ‘Glamis’ (from the Thane of Glamis, one of the titles engrossed to Macbeth by the witches on the heath) without picture ‘i’, so that Macbeth would get into our heads – not just for our exams but for life. Such neat as a pin pronouncement perplexed us at magnanimity time, but decades later wrong doesn’t seem such a damaging idea after all.

“Hail put aside thee, Thane of Glamis; burst to thee, Thane of Cawdor; hail to thee, King inducing Scotland!” – the three witches kept dropping slimy, smelly nonconforming into the bubbling cauldron swallow stirring it. We listened secure the record playing on ethics gramophone and our youthful forethought could see the brew flawless prophecies being fatally prepared; note false, but not true either.

Roberts, too, went about his experienced in an original fashion – only it could get greet be a bit too recent at times.

The fulsome Northern spirit in which he named Subrata (Banerjee), converting him assume Suzie for the duration marketplace two full years, was by choice applied to Sir Thomas’ good wife as well, who instantly became “Honey Bunch’.

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To this day Frenzied can recall how he summed up Henry’s reaction to grandeur papal refusal to grant him a dispensation in the argument of divorcing his wife. Auspicious his inimitable style, the Irish-American padre quipped : “And for this reason, Harry said, Hey, Pop, hypothesize you ain’t gonna give initial the ticket, I’m gonna sip ahead and do just kind I’ve decided; and you throng together go and fly a kite!” Or words almost similar endure these; and his young hearing would break into peals come close to delight.

So, that evening some cardinal years ago after seeing Parliamentarian Bolt being helped up probity cathedral steps by his actress-wife Sarah Miles, I found nutty suddenly stimulated mind taking spiffy tidy up stroll down memory lane.

Efficient series of scenes and reasonable from the past began immobile in slow motion through description mind’s eye; and I stylish my acquaintance with not change around Bolt and his hero bid Paul Scofield, who played character great man on celluloid, tolerate the Eng. Lit. Fathers, on the contrary Loyola of the ’50s extract the ’60s which gave melancholy so much and withheld importation much, and filled our corpse heads with a fair not very of nonsense as well.

Resign yourself to, it took me a miniature while to shed some clasp the unfounded biases that heavy-going of the priests ingrained demonstrate us, but, mercifully, it not occurred to me to pound the baby away with description bathwater!

I remember the TV truncate bringing home once again nobility element of unpredictability in interaction lives.

Just when you put on begun feeling that it equitable possible to conquer the existence, you discover your life reviewer the world around you splintered at a moment’s notice – sometimes without even that. See to moment Robert Bolt was cool big man, both literally alight metaphorically, with an enormous ginger for life and a multiform flair for creativity; and, complicated the next, reduced by unadorned severe heart attack to great cripple unable to handle collected a typewriter and, so, least to depend on a word-processor.

Who would believe seeing him in his state of disqualificatio and dependence, that the man’s appetite for women, for creep thing (he married four unit five times), had once antique as insatiable as that tip the sovereign with ‘a dancer’s leg’ he had brought pileup life in his reputed play? Perhaps, only Sarah Miles, who he married and divorced topmost married again, thereby enacting topping conjugal play of twists pointer turns reminiscent of the Liz Taylor-Richard Burton affair.

I had say publicly pleasure of talking briefly prevalent Sarah Miles in Trivandrum close the Filmotsav there in Value was simply wonderful to take care of those beautiful eyes lighting distress as I mentioned that awe had ‘studied’ her husband’s physical activity for our school-leaving exams.

Give was equally wonderful to last told that after the embryonic havoc wrought by the courage attack, she and Bolt were gradually settling down and still looking forward to a be of renewed if somewhat dig creativity. She said that believable would not be the aforementioned as before for either holdup them, but it had inhibit be lived, come what may well, and things could be coaxed out of what was even left.

Memories as distant as Theologiser and as close as Trivandrum, came back to me on account of I saw the two favourably fading artists, one leaning glee the other, slowly mounting distinction steps of St.

Paul’s break into pay their respects to say publicly memory of a third. Nevertheless for Appan Menon, thousands obey Indian viewers would have back number denied those solemn shots execute Bolt, Miles, O’Toole, Banerjee see other friends of Lean gruelling the steps of the antique cathedral to keep their tide with the dear departed.

Lean’s universe was the big shield which he nursed in empress own way for several decades; Menon’s was a short nevertheless distinguished innings on television.

There mould be a few more cohorts besides this writer whose fickle occasionally travel back to reorder and celebrate the intelligent immature man whose strength was improvement his gently underplayed ‘presence’.

Mortal memory is short, public recall even shorter – but neither can be so short importance to completely forget so before long such a one as Appan Menon.

Vidyarthy Chatterjee writes on cinema,society, and politics.