[vc_row][vc_column][vc_column_text]<\/p>\n
Rajiv Menon<\/strong>can recollect a few yarns right from the age of four. Like, doing homework, listening to his mother reciting a sublime<\/span>\u00a0<\/span>keerthana.\u00a0<\/span><\/em>Music, he learnt from his mother Kalyani Menon (popular Tamil and Malayalam playback singer). She would explain the ragas\u2014<\/span>Devagandhari<\/span><\/em>\u00a0and\u00a0Shankarbaranam<\/em>.\u00a0<\/span>A lot of these hung around in his head.<\/span><\/p>\n Being the son of a Naval officer, he recalls shuttling between the North and South of India. And nowhere did he see a television set while growing up. He just remembers watching a few war films\u2014The Guns of Navarone<\/em><\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/em>for instance. Then at Vizag, he was familiarised with<\/span>\u00a0late 70s Hindi cinema<\/span>\u2014<\/span>Yaadon Ki Baraath.\u00a0<\/span><\/em>The cinema he saw in his formative years made a huge impression on the young mind\u2014one of them was MT Vasudevan Nair\u2019s Malayalam film Nirmalayam,\u00a0<\/span>\u00a0Hindi films of Shyam Benegal and Guru Dutt\u2019s \u00a0Shaib Biwi aur Gulam<\/span>\u00a0and Ramu Kariat\u2019s Chemmen\u00a0\u00a0\u201c<\/span>You got a sense of wow.<\/span><\/em>\u201d<\/span><\/em><\/p>\n It was after joining the Madras F<\/span>ilm\u00a0<\/span>Institute that he got introduced to Bengali films of Satyajith Ray and Mrinal Sen. In Ray, he found an incredible master, who could write, shoot, draw and sketch.<\/span>\u00a0But it wasn<\/span>\u2019<\/span>t until he saw the films of Bharati Raja, J Mahendran, and Balu Mahendra that cinematography trickled into his view. That was also when Ilayaraja<\/span>\u2019<\/span>s music was getting popular.\u00a0<\/span>\u201c<\/span>All of them were breakthrough artists\u2014be it the way they were shot or how the colour was coming through. They pulled me to see Tamil cinema.<\/span><\/em>\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n This was the age when he was getting exposed to a lot of things. After his father died, he was sure he didn<\/span>\u2019<\/span>t want to be part of any rat race. It was a photo journalist\u00a0<\/span>(Desikan from\u00a0The Hindu)<\/em>\u00a0who stayed on the first floor of his rented home who handed him a spare camera. He went around clicking two rolls of black and white.\u00a0<\/span>\u201c<\/span>And with that, I decided I could<\/span>\u00a0be a cinematographer.<\/span>\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n As he waited for the Madras film institute interview, with a few passport size black and white photos in his pocket, Rajiv felt he was being foolish.\u00a0<\/span>\u201c<\/span>Everyone had come with blow ups of wildlife, landscapes and portraits and I knew I stood no chance.<\/span>\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n When they asked him to show his photographs, Rajiv said he didn<\/span>\u2019<\/span>t have anything to show. When they chided him, he shot back\u2014 \u201cHow can you be so sure these photos aren<\/span>\u2019<\/span>t clicked by their fathers?<\/span>\u201d\u00a0<\/span>He was still hurt and angry for having lost his dad so early in his life. The board members were stumped for some time. But they were intrigued enough to start a conversation with him\u2014from Pablo Picasso to Spanish civil war to photography. And he answered them all. After all, he was a Bournvita quiz winner.<\/span><\/p>\n At the film institute, there weren\u2019t many classes, but they got exposed to cinema by Hariharan and Jnanashekaran. Since they didn\u2019t have much opportunities to watch many films, they decided to form the Chennai film society.<\/p>\n [\/vc_column_text][\/vc_column][\/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column][vc_single_image image=”1324″ img_size=”full” alignment=”center”][\/vc_column][\/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column][vc_column_text]<\/p>\n Stepping into ad world<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n Rajiv began as an industrial still photographer. He also dabbled in fashion shoots and industrial films. Then he got into commercials. For a commercial recording of Harvest groundnut oil, they required the sound of a plate breaking. Someone told him about this young lad who could make sounds out of a synthesiser. He assisted Ilayaraja at that time. Dileep was his name. He showed Rajiv how to do it. He again went back to him for a boiler industrial ad. Dileep produced some jazz fusion music for that. \u201cHis recording sound was fascinating,\u201d he recalls. They followed it with Alvyn trendy quartz commercial. Rajiv and Dileep found a rhythm between them and hit pay dirt with Asian paints Pongal ad.<\/p>\n \u00a0Roja\u00a0<\/em>happened and the world came to know the musician by the name of A.<\/span>R.<\/span>\u00a0Rahman.<\/p>\n \u00a0Films that refuse to kickstart and meeting Mani Ratnam<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n Rajiv shot quite a few documentaries for Shyam Bengal and Girish Karnad and it was Karnad who offered him a film\u00a0<\/span>Jokumaraswamy<\/span><\/em>,<\/span><\/em>\u00a0<\/span><\/em>but got stalled when its hero Shankar Nag died in a car crash the day before shoot. His next film,<\/span>\u00a0<\/span>Agniputhri<\/span><\/em>\u00a0<\/span>also met with the same fate.<\/span><\/p>\n Karnad called him again for his next film,<\/span>\u00a0Cheluvi (1992),<\/em>\u00a0which was shot in Poomulli Mana.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n P.<\/span>C. Sreeram was looking for someone to fill in his shoes to shoot Pratap Pothen<\/span>\u2019s road movie,<\/span>\u00a0Chaithanya<\/span><\/em>\u00a0(1991), starring Nagarjuna and Gauthami. The onus fell on Rajiv.<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/span>It was a difficult film to shoot, full of chase scenes , boat chase, motor cycle chase. It was physically and mentally exhausting\u00a0and \u00a0I couldn<\/span>\u2019<\/span>t wait to get back to commercials.<\/span><\/p>\n \u00a0<\/span>Looking back, Rajiv admits, he also made a lot of foolish decisions. Like this man who approached him with a script at AVM studios and Rajiv who didn<\/span>\u2019<\/span>t like the script, suggested Madhu Ambat instead. He was Manoj Night Shyamalan. The film was<\/span>\u00a0<\/span>Praying with Anger\u00a0<\/span><\/em>(1992).<\/span><\/p>\n \u00a0<\/span>Second instance was when Mani Ratnam called him to be the hero of<\/span>\u00a0Roja<\/em>\u00a0<\/span>and he declined it saying he only wanted to shoot the film.\u00a0<\/span>\u201c<\/span>Even now Mani teases me about it.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n Bombay<\/em>\u00a0(1995) changed his life.\u00a0<\/span>It was something different. The thrill of recreating Bombay in Chennai. The riots, the romance, the colours, the rain.<\/span>\u201d<\/p>\n
can recollect a few yarns right from the age of four. Like, doing homework,<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":1670,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"translation":{"provider":"WPGlobus","version":"2.8.1","language":"ta","enabled_languages":["en","ta"],"languages":{"en":{"title":true,"content":true,"excerpt":true},"ta":{"title":false,"content":false,"excerpt":false}}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesica.in\/ta\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1323"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesica.in\/ta\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesica.in\/ta\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesica.in\/ta\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesica.in\/ta\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1323"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/thesica.in\/ta\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1323\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1327,"href":"https:\/\/thesica.in\/ta\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1323\/revisions\/1327"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesica.in\/ta\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1670"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesica.in\/ta\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1323"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesica.in\/ta\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1323"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesica.in\/ta\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1323"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}