Selfies are a big disaster: Adoor Gopalakrishnan

Veteran filmmaker Adoor Gopalakrishnan, who in his glittering career extending close to five decades has won 16 National Awards so far, finds the new craze of selfies a disaster.

The 76-year-old was here at The Nehru Memorial Museum Library for a discussion on "Revisting Ray", a conference and exhibition on the filmmaker, on Wednesday along with filmmaker Amol Paleker.

Recollecting few incidents, Gopalakrishnan pointed out out a lack of decorum.

"I might be unfamiliar with social media but one thing I find is a big disaster is 'selfies' . It is impossible. Once someone kept asking for a selfie, so I stood. But then he kept his hand on my shoulder which I had to remove and scolded him... I said, 'How can you behave like this? Are you my age? We are not even friends.'," he said.

Citing another example of a young mediaperson who kept chasing him for a byte during a film festival in the captial, Gopalakrishnan higlighted the ignorance of people today.

"During one of the film festivals that took place at the Siri Fort auditorium, there was a group of people who waited for a byte. That time I did not even know what a byte is. I kept running away, avoiding them and by the end, there was one girl who was determined for a byte, so I thought why disappoint her.

"I made sense from her question and gave her an answer for the same. While leaving, in the end she asked me what is my name," narrated the filmmaker, much to the audience's amusement.

"That is the new media. They don't use their mind, they only want to ask what do you feel about this or this," said Gopalakrishnan.

--IANS

ks/vm