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| Author Sumeetha Manikandan |
Would you want your books to be adapted into cinema? Yes or no and why?
Now who wouldn’t want their books to be adapted into movies! Many attempts have been made to make Ponniyin Selvan into a movie. The first attempt was by our own illustrious Chief Minister M.G. Ramachandran in 1958, when he was still acting in the movies. It got shelved due to financial reasons. Next attempt was by ace director Maniratnam, in 2012, but even he couldn’t get it off the floors due to budget constraints.
However, seeing films like Bahubali gives me hope that someday, a director of the same caliber might be able to pull it off. It would be awesome to see our favourite characters from Ponniyin Selvan on the screen. I hope someone does it soon enough. I am a part of multiple Ponniyin Selvan groups on Facebook and Google Plus and most discussions will inevitable end with who should play your favourite characters. There are thousands of people out of there in these groups posting polls and opinions as to who should play Vandiya Devan, Arul Mozhi Varman, Karikalan or Kundavai. After watching Bahubali, many imagined Sathyaraj as Periya Pazhuvetarayar and Anushka as Nandini and so on…
Earlier, the length of the novel was a deterrent to screen writers and it is impossible to condense the entire story of Ponniyin Selvan into one movie. That and the fact that one needs a huge budget to film an epic of this proportion deterred many filmmakers from taking this up. But now the time is ripe. People do flock to the theatres to see movies even with a cliff-hanger ending. Harry Potter series came up to eight movies while Lord of the Rings came with three. Our own Bahubali came out as two movies. I am sure the audience would have gone, even if there were a third movie in the making.
This is surely the right time to make a Ponniyin Selvan movie(s). I hope someone takes note soon enough.
About the Author
Sumeetha Manikandan is a top bestselling romance author whose novellas ‘Perfect Groom’ and ‘These Lines of Mehendi’ (which was published as a paperback novel called ‘Love Again’) have been on the top of Amazon India charts ever since its publication. A bookaholic, thinker, feminist and a daydreamer, she reads across genres and is a crazy fan of history, romance and science fiction novels.
An avid reader of historical novels, she has been translating Kalki Krishnamurthy’s classic Tamil novel Ponniyin Selvan for the past ten years and hopes to translate more of his novels to English.
Sumeetha is married to filmmaker K.S. Manikandan and lives with her nine-year- old daughter in Chennai.
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