I couldn't agree more! 💯
Beautifully penned by K A Shaji. ♥️
I have always thought of Sreenivasan as a communist who never allowed communism to become comfortable. He was the rare kind who loved an idea enough to fight it, to embarrass it, to hold it up to the light and ask why it had begun to lie to itself. Today, as the news of his death settles into my body with a dull, unrelenting ache, I realise that I did not just lose a filmmaker I admired. I lost a voice that taught me how to doubt without becoming cynical, how to laugh without surrendering conscience.
I grew up with his films as part of my moral education. Sandesam did not merely make me laugh. It unsettled me. It shook the inherited certainties of party loyalty that surrounded me like air. Here was a man inside the Left tradition, speaking its truths with merciless honesty. He showed how ideology, when emptied of empathy, can turn grotesque. The brothers screaming slogans across a dining table were not fiction. They were our uncles, our neighbours, sometimes ourselves. Sreenivasan taught me, gently but firmly, that politics which cannot tolerate self-criticism is already decaying.
Arabikkatha broke me in a quieter way. I remember watching it and feeling a lump in my throat that refused to dissolve. A communist walking through the Gulf, carrying his beliefs like a suitcase that suddenly feels too heavy. That loneliness, that moral fatigue, that awkward dignity of compromise. Sreenivasan understood migrant life not as economics but as emotion. He captured the ache of ideological displacement, the sadness of realising that slogans do not pay rent, and yet refusing to abandon belief altogether. That film stayed with me like a bruise.
With Chinthavishtayaya Shyamala, he entered the spaces where men rarely look at themselves honestly. I watched it later in life, and it frightened me with its clarity. The politics here were not on the street but in the bedroom, in silences, in the entitlement of not listening. Shyamala’s thinking was revolutionary. Sreenivasan taught me that patriarchy survives not through cruelty alone, but through laziness of the heart. That film did something few political texts ever did. It made me ashamed, and then it made me want to be better.
And then there was Udayananu Tharam, where he peeled open the cinema itself, exposing its vanities, betrayals and market driven ethics. He laughed at success and mourned talent crushed under power. As someone who lives by words and stories, that film felt uncomfortably intimate. It reminded me that even art is not innocent, and that survival often comes at a cost we pretend not to see.
What I loved most about Sreenivasan was his courage to be ridiculous. He played the rat person of our social life, the one who knows the cracks, the hidden passages, the moral compromises. He never wanted to be heroic. He chose instead to be honest. His comedy was not escape. It was diagnosis. Satire was his scalpel, cutting through ideological failure, masculine arrogance, cultural pretence. He made us laugh and then quietly placed a mirror in our hands.
As an actor, he carried intelligence on his face. Not polished intelligence, but lived, slightly wounded intelligence. His characters stammered, failed, envied, sulked. They were small men crushed by big ideas and bigger systems. In them, I saw Kerala, with all its political literacy and emotional illiteracy. I saw myself too, and that recognition was never comfortable.
Today, thinking of him, my eyes sting. Not just because he is gone, but because voices like his are becoming rare. In an age of loud certainties and ideological vanity, Sreenivasan stood for something unfashionable. Doubt. Humility. Self ridicule. He believed politics must begin with listening, and art must begin with honesty.
Sreenivasan did not give me answers. He gave me questions that refused to leave. He taught me that laughter can be a form of resistance, that love for an idea must include the courage to criticise it, and that the most political act sometimes is simply to think, deeply and painfully.
As I write this, I feel a heaviness that words cannot lift. But I also feel gratitude. For the films. For the laughter that carried grief inside it. For the courage to say uncomfortable truths. Sreenivasan may have left the frame, but his voice remains, arguing, teasing, whispering in our ears.
Some people do not just make cinema. They shape the way you see the world.
Sreenivasan was one of them.
From the satirical bites of “Sandesham”to the raw emotion of “Vadakkunokkiyantram”, he taught us to laugh at ourselves while thinking deeper. A true master of the craft who redefined what it means to be a "hero" on screen, & who was an effective director as well.
Beyond the actor was a brilliant writer who captured the pulse of Kerala like no other. Sreenivasan’s scripts are time capsules of social commentary, humor, and unparalleled wit. There will never be another observer of life quite like him.
Some artists entertain, some enlighten, some provoke. Sreenivasan did it all, with a smile that carried truth and a laugh that carried responsibility.
