Ram Gopal Varma Blog #167. I was born in Siddhartha Engineering College

If a man is about what he is and not what he was then I would say my birth was at Siddhartha Engineering College in Vijayawada. This is because if I take into consideration the kind of a person I am today, I can trace back every thought, every idea, every experience and every influence I have ever had in my life back to something which happened on that campus.

The kind of people I met, I interacted and hobnobbed with on that campus had helped me in gaining an enormous insight into so many things including the various aspects of human minds. Right from my debut film “SHIVA” till my Mumbai-based so-called realistic films, I have many times designed the characters and also incidents in those films based upon something which happened there or someone I knew or interacted with on that campus.

I was awed with certain lecturers personalities notably among them Mr.N.Prabhakar Rao our Maths lecturer. I used to admire our then Principal T.Venugopal Rao who I consider to be one of the most dynamic personalities I have ever met in my life. I still remember an incident when he was addressing us students in the night time in the hostel compound when someone from the crowd shouted something very derogatory from the darkness. He shot back saying that he is not scared of people who go to Tamil Nadu and abuse people in Telugu and of people who will never dare to come into the light. There was absolute silence after that.

I was a bad student and I did not deserve to be a part of that campus as I failed twice in my course. But having said that, the campus did give me a tremendous dose of education in each and every aspect of my life in every conceivable way.

It taught me to respect, to fear, to understand, to empathize, to look up to great students and also to feel guilty about me not being one.

Now that I spend lakhs and crores it almost seems unimaginable to me how I could have survived there on the 400 rupees my father used to send me every month. Inspite of that I don’t ever remember me being unhappy about not having money. I guess that’s because of the spirit of the camaraderie I had around me, it seemed as if everybody’s money belonged to everybody.

Hoping that even a dog’s tail can be straightened there were countless times some lecturers tried to educate me on the ills of being a bad student and warned me that I will have no future. That’s because I hardly ever used to attend college and all the time I used to be in film theatres around the campus like Vijayalaxmi, Ramapriya, Ramkrishna, etc.

Fair enough that I have made it in life as a filmmaker and I think mainly it is due to me not attending college and attending theatres but this only could be an exception and not a rule. Since my first film “SHIVA” was a hit, I can now hold up my collar but what if it hadn’t been. It’s not as if I knew my first film was going to be a hit. If I knew what will be a hit why would I make flops too?

The biggest contribution that Siddhartha Engineering College did to me is that since I lived in a protective environment vis-à-vis my family from my birth onwards at my home in Hyderabad, by being suddenly plunged into that campus which was completely alien to me in terms of both the place and its people, I experienced a very different and real world and hence I had the opportunity to learn about everything once again from its beginning in its true nature.

When you are a child and everyone around you is taking care of you it is so easy to imagine that you are the centre of the world and that your father is the king and the city you are seeing through your window is your kingdom.

Only when you are thrown into an alien environment that you realize that you are just one of the many and there’s nothing really special about you and then from the experiences you gather there you can atleast make a sincere attempt to become special and this is where Siddhartha Engineering College helped me tremendously.

Lagadapati Rajgopal the Congress MP and me used to ride around in the campus on his bike and were involved in plenty of fights on the campus. I was not at all surprised when later on in life he became a big time politician as I could see the markings of a leader in him very clearly even back then.

The entire opening sequence of my first film “SHIVA” was an incident which happened right outside the college gate. I just used various aspects of the cinematic medium like cinematography, music etc to capture it correctly and enhance the effect.

The opening sequence of “Raat” (“Raatri” in Telugu) was conceived by me sitting in a tea stall in a place called Kamayya Thoppu which was just a stones throw away from the campus. In the film I actually put a board with the name “Kamayya Thoppu” to pay my respects to that place.

I had an opportunity to study the frustrations of economically backward people and the anger and jealousy which comes out of it towards the rich people from how us engineering college students used to look at the much more well-off medical college students who used to be in the same campus during those days. This study of mine I put to use in various forms in my films over a period of time.

I realized that a woman looks most desirable when she has the least make up from my observations of a construction labourer on the campus nicknamed “rifle” which eventually contributed to how I portrayed my heroines.

I met the most intelligent man I have ever come across in my life called “Satyendra” on that campus who initiated me into the various philosophies of the world.

I studied Goonda elements and power mongers in and around the campus and till today I keep using and have also used their character traits and their psychological aspects in quite a few characters of my films like “Satya”, “Company” etc.

Well, the whole point of this article is that inspite of me knowing that other people’s memories are always boring I still could not resist writing it as I was invited for an Alumni meet with my batch-mates on December 25th in the college. So in the excitement of me, Rajgopal and all our other friends going to be in that space after so many years I wrote this to share it with whoever is interested. As for the rest who are not interested, SORRY!

On 25th December if you feel like you can wish me Happy Birthday, as like I said I was truly born at Siddhartha Engineering College.