In the space of a single day on Tuesday, Kerala lost two icons, one from the field of politics and the other from cinema. Both defied conventional metaphors in their oeuvres to carve out a space of their own.One was Baby John — comrade industrialist-cum-workers’ leader, 11-time MLA, seven-time minister, former all-India general secretary of the Revolutionary Socialist Party (RSP) and, for long, the state’s shrewdest and most sought after political strategist and coalition troubleshooter, earning him the nickname ‘Kerala Kissinger’. Ninety years’ old, John passed away in the wee hours on Tuesday after 11 years of illness. The other was V Gopinathan Nair, or Bharat Gopi as the world knows him. The only actor apart from Sadhu Mehr to win the national award for best actor in a debut lead role, Gopi starred in many of Malayalam cinema’s pathbreaking films that completely overhauled the traditional hero image. He also starred in Hindi movies like Govind Nihalani’s Aghat and Mani Kaul’s Satah Se Udta Admi. Seventy-one-year-old Gopi died in a Thiruvananthapuram hospital on Tuesday noon. Freedom fighter and Congressman turned unalloyed Communist, Baby John determinedly broke the conventional mould in the early 1950s to build up a phenomenally successful twin career that no one else could dare think of. He was one of the state’s best known marine industrialists and exporters (John owned a fleet of fishing boats, set up many big seafood processing factories trading globally), while at the same time, being one of the state’s tallest trade union leaders and probably one of its most successful organiser of workers. He was also one of its longest serving legislators (for 37 years), and a complete hardline Leftist.Even in Kerala’s highly sensitive political milieu, John managed to successfully keep these two seemingly dichotomous careers apart, to serve in the both the Right and Left cabinets of every chief minister from C Achutha Menon, K Karunakaran, A K Antony and P K Vasudevan Nair to E K Nayanar, until a stroke laid him low in the mid-1990s while he was Nayanar’s Irrigation minister. But John was best known as the state’s most celebrated political stabiliser and troubleshooter, playing his role in both the coalitions he was in at different times when the coalitions were in their teething stages. Gopi, on his part, clobbered pet Malayali prejudices and set images of the essential movie hero, with Adoor Gopalakrishnan’s Kodiyettam in 1977, after his acclaimed cameo in Adoor’s Swayamvaram five years earlier. Then followed a slew of movies and roles that greatly changed the way Kerala perceived its cinema — including Peruvazhiyampalam (1979), Greeshmam (1980) Palangal (1981), Yavanika and Ormakkayi (1982), Kattathe Kilikoodu (1983), and Chidambaram (1985).Besides various regional and national honours for acting, including the Asia-Pacific international award for his performance in Kattathe Kilikoodu, Gopi also won the national award for authoring the best book on cinema for his Abhinayam Anubhavam, and the national award for producing the best socially relevant movie (Yamanam, 1991), among others. He was also one of the only five Indian actors to be feted with a five-film retrospective of films in Paris by the French Government. The retrospective was held in 1985. The other four actors similarly honoured have been Smita Patil, Naseeruddin Shah, Om Puri and Amitabh Bachchan.
