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Discovering Usha for international television
Mythili Radhakrishnan discusses a point with Usha during a shooting session.
HERS WAS a story waiting to be documented. But, it has taken an international television channel to discover the huge potential of filming a documentary on P. T. Usha, India's greatest athlete of all time.
The producer-director of the programme, -- to be aired on the Discovery Channel -- Mythili Radhakrishnan, has been in Kozhikode for nearly a week, shooting Usha, from 7 in the morning till after 10 in the night. "It's pretty tough in this weather, yes," she admits, at the end of another long day at Payyoli, Usha's hometown. "But it's interesting too, documenting the life of a great personality like Usha," says Mythili, who is based in Singapore.
Usha's amazing success story -- of a little village lass running her way into sporting folklore -- will be unravelled in the `Crossings' series on `Discovery' (she's the first Indian to be featured in the series). These one-hour biographies are not made in the conventional format. The story is told through the `crossing moments' or turning points in one's life, the persons or events that help them achieve greatness.
Defining moments
Usha's life has been full of such `crossings', of which Mythili will focus on four: Usha's meeting with her mentor and one of India's best-known coaches, O.M. Nambiar, the National Open trials where she qualified for the Los Angeles Olympics, her meeting with Dr. Abdul Azeez who treated her injured ankle and helped her get back on the track after the disappointing Seoul Olympics, and her meeting with Mohandas Pai, Infosys CFO who played a key role in the setting up of the Usha School of Athletics.
"And we've also spoken to some other important people in Usha's life," says Mythili. "Her mother, her uncle and her husband, Sreenivasan, with whom I am rather impressed, I must say. He's so unlike a conventional Indian husband. He has no problem with his wife being in the limelight always."
Mythili, vice-president and executive producer of Right Angle, a Singapore-based media organisation that produces software for international channels like Discovery and National Geographic as well as local television stations, has already done a few programmes in the `Crossings' series. "Being one of the senior people in my organisation, I mostly supervise programmes these days, rather than producing and directing them myself," she says. "But `Crossings' has been one series I have enjoyed working on, especially the episodes on the Malaysian cartoonist Lat and Prof. Mohammed Younis from Bangladesh (the founder of the Grameen Bank and the concept of microcrediting)."
Next schedule
She and her six-member crew will return in May to film what Usha does best: run. "As Usha has not recovered from her knee injury, we could not shoot her running this time," she says. "We have finished most of the shooting otherwise; we've been to the Sports Division School at Kannur, where she was a student, the Railways, which is her work-place, her home, the Usha School..."
Usha is impressed by the high degree of professionalism of Mythili and her team. "This has been a totally different experience for me, though I've done many interviews for television in the past," says the woman who missed an Olympic medal by one-hundredth of a second. "Mythili demands perfection. She even chose my costume for each shot. Though the filming does take a lot of my time, I have no complaints because I am sure it will be worth it. Yes, it feels nice that I am the first Indian in this series on Discovery."
The programme will be aired on Discovery Asia in July. "I am sure it will also be telecast on Discovery India soon," says Mythili.
It definitely is one show on television worth waiting for.
By P.K. Ajith Kumar
Photo: S. Ramesh Kurup
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Life
Bangalore
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