FALLEN STAR
Actor Dileep’s arrest uncovers the dark underbelly of Malayalam cinema
When Malayalam superstar Dileep was brought to the Aluva subjail near Kochi after his arrest, the waiting mob chanted, “Welcome to Central Jail,” the title of a 2016 movie he starred in that would come to haunt him a year later. The arrest capped five months of investigations into a sordid case, where a contract goon kidnapped and sexually abused a popular actress. The case shocked Kerala and became another challenge for an already embattled state police and the Pinarayi Vijayan government.
While the arrest comes as a major victory for the victim and her family, it is also a muchneeded boost for the Kerala police, whose image had taken a beating after a series of goofups in highprofile cases. The arrest came as a big blow to the Malayalam actors’ guild, AMMA, which had stood by Dileep, its major fundraiser. It also sent tremors through the Malayalam film industry—where 119 movies were made in 2016— and exposed the slimy underbelly of the stardriven industry.
The repercussions could go well beyond the actor’s per
DILEEP HELD THE VICTIM RESPONSIBLE FOR RUINING HIS MARRIAGE WITH MANJU WARRIER
sonal commitments (three of his upcoming movies, including the Rs 13 crore Ramleela, will surely suffer). It has also shaken up his Rs 600 crore business empire spanning film distribution, production, theatres, real estate, hotels and tourism. Following Dileep’s arrest, AMMA stripped him off its primary membership even as the newly formed Women’s Collective in Cinema, a pressure group of Malayalam cinema’s female stars who came together after the incident, welcomed the arrest. The Enforcement Directorate and IT department are also looking into his businesses now. The charges against Dileep include rape, conspiracy and kidnapping, among others, and he could get the maximum punishment of 20 years if found guilty.
“In the last decade, Dileep had become an integral part of the Malayalam film industry, virtually controlling the directors, producers and actors. He was a ‘don’ of the Malayalam film industry till yesterday,” says a film director who did not want to be named. Don, incidentally, was one of Dileep’s superhit movies in 2006.
The events that led to the superstar’s arrest had all the makings of a crime thriller. When Dileep, whose real name is Gopalakrishnan, left to meet police officials on the night of July 9, he was still hoping to make it back home. The 48yearold had contacted a ‘friend’, a senior Kerala police officer, who had reassured him that there was “nothing to worry”. But minutes into the interrogation with prime suspect ‘Pulsar’ Suni, Dileep realised he was trapped. He first pleaded innocence, but later confessed to his role in the crime. The incident happened on February 17 this year. Suni and his cohorts abused the actress in a moving car in Kochi for over two hours. After videographing the assault, she was dropped off near film director Lal’s home in Kochi. Following a complaint, the police detained Martin Antony, her chauffeur that day, for questioning. He led them to Suni, who was arrested when he came to surrender in Ernakulam. Though there were rumours from the beginning, Dileep’s involvement only came to light after he complained of being blackmailed by Suni’s jail mates. Vishnu, Suni’s partner, wanted Rs 1.5 crore to keep the actor’s role a secret. A senior police official says they have all sorts of evidence against the conspirators. “The victim’s statement did not mention Dileep. But we knew Suni had the backing of someone powerful. When Dileep lodged the complaint, we started focusing on him,” he says.
According to the police, the victim was close to Dileep and his exwife and actress Manju Warrier, before the couple separated. In fact, earlier on she was promoted by Dileep in many of his films. But later, the actor suspected that she had ratted on him, telling Warrier about his extramarital relationship with actress Kavya Madhavan (whom he later married). This sparked off the animosity that later led to the hiring of Suni, according to the police. Suni has also told the police that he had tried to attack the actress twice before, once in Goa, and another time near her home in Thrissur, Kerala, but the plan didn’t work out.
Following Dilip’s interrogation, DGP Loknath Behera, who had gone through the witness statements (by 40 people and running into 900 pages), briefed CM Pinarayi on July 10 about the developments in the case. The CM had been roundly criticised for his comments supporting Dileep in the early days of the case. He had given a free hand to the investigation team afterwards to score a political point. Also, the actress was said to be planning to approach the high court to demand a CBI probe. With Dileep’s arrest, Pinarayi hopes to send out a strong message that such crimes will not go unpunished while also blunting some of the Opposition’s criticism.
Meanwhile, the senior police official told india today that they had “all the evidence needed against Dileep in the case”. Next up for the ‘don’ of Malayalam movies: some real life drama behind bars.
Reading these vastly different memoirs by John McEnroe and Diego Maradona is a reminder that sport once meant something more than money. This is not to say, as old farts always do, that ‘things were better in my day’. The feats of today’s athletes are as thrilling as they always have been. But sport, for all its omnipresence, has lost its resonance and its influence on wider culture beyond the generating of commerce. Money has reduced our greatest games to a series of bloodless transactions. And so we have the athletes to match. Their talent corralled and coerced into selling products, they’re now primped and varnished creatures whose every word is scripted and every gesture sponsored.
At the highest levels, athletes appear stripped of complexity. No longer allowed to say anything political, or to indicate any interest in anything outside the narrow confines of their particular sport and commercial interests. Take Roger Federer, whose gossamer game, a bewitching mix of sinewy strength and frailty, was reduced by Nike each Wimbledon for years to a farcical embodiment of tennis ‘tradition’. Federer was trotted out as some sort of Lord Fauntleroy character, a symbol, in his cream blazer, of the game’s aristocratic pretensions, its clubby snobbery. The timelessness of Federer’s strokes, their aesthetic appeal is translated, in the crude language of advertising, into burnished bourgeois stolidity.
McEnroe’s game was almost as sublime as Federer’s, his touch almost as soft. But where Federer, like Bjorn Borg before him, had to rein in his anger, suppress his competitive desire, McEnroe let it spiral into baroque outbursts—ever more extravagant demonstrations of how to lose your s**t on a tennis court. McEnroe likes to think of himself as a rebel, an affront to tennis’s prissiness. Like Jimmy Connors, who brought a gleeful vulgarity to proceedings, McEnroe refused to buy into Wimbledon’s stuffy self-mythologising.
It’s great that all of McEnroe’s piss and vinegar, the punk insolence of his playing prime, hasn’t curdled into misanthropy. But did it have to dwindle into shtick? But Seriously, a second volume of autobiographical
MCENROE’S IS DEPRESSING BECAUSE IT’S SO DULL. THANK GOD, THEN, FOR DIEGO ARMANDO MARADONA
maunderings, is depressing because it is so dull. McEnroe takes us through his post-tennis misadventures in light entertainment and his friendships with a variety of musicians, from Keith Richards to Chrissy Hynde. Neither his name-dropping nor his banal anecdotes serve to amuse, enlighten, or spark an ember of interest. And each yarn is concluded with an exclamatory declaration of the obvious: Who would have thought that John McEnroe would turn into a thundering bore?
Thank God, then, for Diego Armando Maradona. Touched By God is his memoir of the 1986 World Cup. Stranded in Dubai, in self-imposed exile, “sitting here in front of one of the many television sets I have in my house in Palm Jumeirah”, Maradona watches every one of Argentina’s games in Mexico. As he watches himself on the pitch where he was the team’s life force, its animating spirit, he recalls how he transformed his country, sunk in post-Falklands War gloom, into world champions and became “the happiest man in the world”. It’s a fantastic story and Maradona’s charisma, unlike McEnroe’s, is intact. He remains crazy, a spiritual outlaw.
Those goals against England, of course, are what everyone remembers. The first, when he jumped higher than Peter Shilton, the much taller England goalkeeper, to fist the ball home; the second routinely voted the greatest goal in the history of the World Cup, in which Maradona left a trail of flat-footed English defenders puffing in his wake like comedy cops and Shilton sprawled inelegantly on the turf. In later life, I’ve grown to love the controversial first even more than the unimpeachable second. The second confirmed what everyone already knew—Maradona was the best player on the planet. The first, though, was a gesture of contempt, a refusal to play the game by the rules. It made Maradona a Third World hero, beloved in Bangladesh as much as he was in Buenos Aires for making the English look both stupid and impotent. What Maradona did in 1986 has no equal. Not even Pele so dominated a single World Cup that all other players, all other countries became the backdrop for a one-man drama.
Maradona remains glorious. Totemic. Only Muhammad Ali had the same effect on his people. Contemporary athletes are anodyne by comparison, their characters stunted. Where once they represented people, they now shill for big business. —Shougat Dasgupta