Honour for screenplay writer Gopalkrishna Pai

Mangalore: Members of the Konkani community felicitated national award winner for the best screenplay writer Gopalkrishna Pai at a function here on Wednesday. Konkani fortnightly “Kodial Khabar” had organised the felicitation ceremony.

Mr. Pai and director Girish Kasaravalli jointly won the national award for their film “Kanassemba Kudureyanneri”.

Humble background

In his acceptance speech, Mr. Pai, who spent his childhood in Perla village in Kasargod taluk of Kerala state, said that films were not screened in his village very often. Coming from such a village, winning the national award is a great honour for him. Describing the script, which brought him the award, he said “it was an experiment” and that it was “uniquely presented in the film”. According to him the speciality of the script was that it engaged the audience and there was a lot of scope for their participation.

On the scope for audience participation, Mr. Pai told The Hindu that “There is scope for mental participation. The script gives some clues and the audience have to create a story based on it,” he said.

Mr. Pai shared the information with the gathering that once he had written and submitted the script to Mr. Kasaravalli, he had told the latter that he would like to be present when the film was shot, instead he would prefer to be there when it was edited. However, “When the editing began, I greatly regretted having missed the shooting”, he said.

One of the filmmaker's he admires most is Norman McLaren, he said.

‘Swapna Saraswat'

Mr. Pai is author of the Konkani novel “Swapna Saraswat”, which was published last year. Introducing the writer, secretary of the Konkani Bhasha Vidyarthi Mandal Venkatesh Nayak said that the Mr. Pai had referred to 4,000 books and collected 15,000 photographs for the novel which is about the Goud Saraswat Brahmin community.

He began researching for the book in 1990, and the first draft contained 620 pages, which was then reduced to 475 pages. The book was translated into English, Marathi, Malayalam, Hindi, Bengali, and Tamil.