Alencier Ley Lopez has just got to Thiruvananthapuram, his home, but he needs to leave again for Kochi. There’s work to be done. Rosapoo, a film with Biju Menon in the lead, has him playing a man called Venugopala Menon. He uses that name a lot in the film, he says, with his characteristic laugh. Alencier is in person pretty much the Alencier on screen, minus the character’s specifics. He talks free, laughs free and makes a stranger feel like a friend. So, on Tuesday, when he stopped at the Chavara Police Station blindfolded, staging a protest, it did not, for those who knew him well, come as a surprise. It was very much the Alencier through the years, when before fame came so hurriedly into his life, he had protested against all that he felt strongly about, in ways he knew best to express himself. Street plays, plays in the church he went to, a running protest around the Secretariat at the time of the Babri Masjid incident.
Few took notice then because he was a theatre actor, only rising to the fame that Rajeev Ravi movies and Dileesh Pothen’s characters had brought along. But now it is different. The blindfolded protest was against BJP leader Saroj Pandey’s remark that her party members will gouge out the eyes of anyone who attacked them in Kerala. “It is not right when someone from the ruling party, a respectable leader, says that. It is not right when a woman says that about Kerala, a state that is an epitome of human love, men have shed their poonoolu (worn by upper caste Hindus) to be elected to rule.
The blindfolded actor complains to Chavara police to ensure safety of his eyes.
Are they not mothers? Are they going to gouge out their children’s eyes?” Alencier asks in beautiful Malayalam, words blending so neatly even as he expresses himself spontaneously without plan or preparation. That’s how his protests work too. He doesn’t think too much. He acts as soon as he feels. “It is my obligation to society as an artist. I could also sleep in an AC room, safely under a blanket, hugging my family, and ignore all this. But I can’t do that.” Alencier has been called a dog (naayi) and a joker (komaali) on social media. A mad man too. After his blindfolded protest. “I accept all of that. I am like a dog, loyal, and have gratitude to society. I am also a komaali, who, with his jokes, can make people forget their pain and suffering at least for a while,” he says in that same beautiful language he seems to naturally switch to, emotion not wrecking it.
“It is the politics and the government that makes me do this. Not because I am on the side of a certain political party and attacking another. I had done a protest against Mani asan (Minister M.M. Mani) on his remarks on Pembilai Orumai. I supported the students of the Pune film institute with another protest.” His protests became more noticed when he staged one wearing a US flag beneath a lungi to express solidarity with Kamal, when the veteran filmmaker was asked to go to Pakistan by right-wing supporters.
He was once ousted from his parish when he took his friend Bhattathiri, dressed him as a beggar and put him among believers who went through seven days of dhyanam (meditation). “Their reaction to seeing a beggar among them showed they won’t turn good no matter how many dhyanams they go to.” Friends in cinema are afraid for him, tell him to be careful. “They tell me people may not understand what I try to do. Friends of Jesus, Buddha, Gandhi and Bhagat Singh would also have said the same thing. But if Bhagat Singh and Gandhi didn’t do what they did, we wouldn’t have got freedom. Someone should always interfere. I am not anything like them. I am just trying to tell people, to remind them we are living in bad times.” And he would tell this, he says, if it is about a party that threatens to gouge eyes out, or one that kills a man with 51 cuts of a knife. “Let politics be of love. I am on the side of love.”
He will continue fighting, he says, staging his one-man protests and letting people around him be a part of it without planning it. “As long as I am alive, I will do it. Theatre didn’t die when Safdar Hashmi was killed. Theatre will always be there. If I get killed, it will continue through my children, the next generation. Of that, I am sure.”
