Babalog at the Oscars

IT is that time of the year again when the soul of a nation long spurned by the Oscar hopes again. You can hear the phones trilling if you h...

IT is that time of the year again when the soul of a nation long spurned by the Oscar hopes again. You can hear the phones trilling if you happen to call Ashvin Kumar. Reckon the same must have happened with the Shwaas director.

Congratulatory messages pour in for Kumar8217;s film The Little Terrorist, nominated for an Oscar this year, not in the 8216;8216;foreign film8217;8217; category but in the 8216;8216;short film8217;8217; one, in the process, giving fresh lease to visions of that slender statuette being held by a pair of Indian hands.

8216;8216;Do you want to take the interview on phone or do you want to see me,8217;8217; Kumar purrs as he directs you to his publicist to fix an appointment and helpfully offers you his websites http://www.terorrist.com and http://www.adventuresinshorts.com for more information about him. 8216;8216;I think once people hear about me, the journey ahead will be a little less tough,8217;8217; he reckons.

Kumar8217;s website is full of copious notes on his filmmaking sojourn with some congratulatory messages helpfully posted alongside. One such message describes him as 8216;8216;an adventure of a rising talent who set out on the road to Ladakh and is later joined by the Little Terorrist en route to international acclaim in Toronto and potential Oscar nomination8217;8217;. Er, is The Colour Purple an inspiration?

From First Day Out8212;a two-minute short film8212;to Sam, a 10-minute short film, to Little Terrorist8212;finally, something running into 15 minutes8212;with a Road to Ladakh in between, Kumar8217;s films seem to be in sync with today8217;s age and time: short in length and nuanced in content.

And they have done the film circuit rounds. In fact, it was after winning a couple of honours, that he decided to enter Little Terrorist in the competitive section.

There is no running theme that informs his films. From exploring loss in Sam to romance and a fiesty fashion model who falls in love with the wrong guy in Road to Ladakh, Kumar is on his way to a full-length feature film in the Mumbai movie industry, one that will have all these elements. Even so, he remains a theatre buff at heart. 8216;8216;I used to write, direct and act in plays in Delhi,8217;8217; he says.

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STEPPING out of the shadows of your mother can be a painful journey specially if she happens to be Ritu Kumar, a name that conjures visions of elegance, high fashion and big price tags. Kumar8217;s publicist restrains questions of the living-under-her-spell type, but it slips out.

For Ashvin Kumar, with no formal degree in filmmaking, his mother8217;s name was the benchmark8212;a very high one that he has had to measure up to. At 34, he8217;s now hunting for a heroine for his first full-length feature film. The hero is on board: Irrfan Khan.

8216;8216;I will get them as news about the Oscar travels. Irrfan has acted in Road to Ladakh and he is my choice for my first full-length feature film,8217;8217; says Kumar, who made England his home in 2001.

Regardless of the outcome on February 27, Oscar night, Kumar will remember this month as a big one. His film on a young Pakistani boy who, chasing a cricket ball, inadvertently lands up on the Indian side of the border, has made him a minor celebrity. If the vote goes his way, maybe just maybe, it could give him more than his 15 minutes of fame.