If there is a good looking girl it's customary for Andhra people to say she looks like "Baapu Geesina Bomma". If there is a friendly conversation involving Godavari districts, the mocking comment "Tu Gochi naa Paa Gochi naa" slips out of your tongue. This is the greatness of BAPU, the versatile director of Tollywood.

Today (15th December) is the 69th birthday for Bapu. Bapu was born in Narsaravpet and graduated from Madras University with a law degree. He joined Andhra Patrika as a political cartoonist. He made our Telugu film "Saakshi" to screen in Tashkent film festival, which was the most successful achievement besides many in his life.

The unique quality of Bapu is his versatile way of communicating to the audience. In his movies, we come to know about what to expect in the movie from the "Titles" reel itself. He does wonderful arts, which portray the characters of his movie. He can deliver a message to the audience with just a funny face drawing without the actors.

His long spell in Tollywood has several milestones. He won national awards for movies like "Sampoorna Ramayanam" and "Mutyla Muggu" for his creativity and characterization. Mullapudi Venkata Ramana's witty words coupled with Bapu's sentences will become pearls in the scripts. I think his last movie was "Rambantu", which was a complete family entertainer with hilarious portrayal. Hasya Prasad made it more appealing with his own style.

Bapu always chooses native stories and presents in native dialect. He does excellent work with his close-up shots and teases the audience with those shots. The selection of technical department is also unique to his style. He makes no compromises on the basic assets of filmmaking. He makes each and every artist rehearse at least two or three times before coming to the camera. His movies sometime make you feel that you are reading a beautiful novel and engross you to catch the meaning of each and every dialogue.

KV Mahadevan, Arudra, and Anil Malnad provided some good talent for Bapu movies for sometime. Unfortunately we haven't seen any of the new Bapu's movies recently and hopefully we will in the near future.

Click here for microsite done by idlebrain for Bapu garu.

Anne Ravi