Living life through laughter

Give a mic to Suhasini Mani Ratnam and she will make people laugh. At a speech for a women managers’ convention in Chennai, Suhasini said, “I am a humble speaker, I speak very well.” And when that gets her a laugh, she talks about husband Mani Ratnam, a professional management graduate, who once solved the crisis of a wedding getting preponed with two sheets of paper and a 20-point programme. “When I asked who’s going to do all this, he said, ‘They didn’t teach me that, they told me to delegate, so you do it’. What they teach at management institutes... they are enemies of wives,” she says to another round of laughter.

It is true that she loves laughter and mindless comedy. She says, “I don’t think too seriously about anything, neither do my husband and my son. When we are home, we are constantly laughing over some trivial matters. It’s a contrast in the movies where I have to be serious and give a message. I would like to give one message. Live life light with a smile.”

Her latest on-screen performance is of a widowed doctor who finds her old love, in the Malayalam feature Love 24x7. That was an easy decision for her. She says. “I have to stay away from our office Madras Talkies, from my family and my other commitments to do a film in Kerala. So I think not once or twice but 20 times. But with Love 24x7, I didn’t have to. It had one good reason. A female director who convinced me that I was right for the role in just 20 minutes.”

Dance was her passion in childhood, but her dad and actor Charu Haasan didn’t want her to dance in public. Surprisingly, he wanted her to act, but her uncle Kamal Haasan did not. Kamal was upset with her for moving away from cinematography — something that he introduced her to. “I take life as it is. I don’t confuse past with the future. Yes my uncle wanted me to be a cinematographer and he was disappointed when I gave up that dream to become an actress. But he too had to accept and respect my decision, no other choice.”