While extending wishes, Chiranjeevi said, ‘’I extend my heartfelt greetings to the friends on the stage, the fans, the invitees, my directors, producers and the audience.’’ Later, Chiru started recalling an incident that he experienced in the year 1988 and he went on to say, ‘’In 1988, I and Naga Babu went to Delhi to receive the Nargis Dutt Best Feature Film Award for Best Film on National Integration for my film ‘Rudraveena’.
Before the awards event has begun, we were having tea time, going through the arrangements there and we happened to see a few film posters on the wall showcasing the history and grandeur of Indian cinema from the Prithiviraj Kapoor to Raj Kapoor, Dilip Kumar, Dev Anand, Amitabh Bachchan. Rajesh Khanna and Dharmendra, every Bollywood actor’s body of work was described on the posters.’’
When it comes to South Cinema, ‘’I thought I would see some legendary south film stars’ posters similarly. But they just showcased the dancing poster of MGR (M G Ramachandran) and Jayalalithaa. They just wrote on the poster that it was South Indian cinema. And I had also seen the poster of Prem Nazir, who played a lead in a record number of films.
But, ‘’It was so incredibly humiliating for me as I did not see any picture of Telugu legends such as N.T.Rama Rao, Akkineni Nageswara Rao, Sivaji Ganesan and Kannada legendary actors Dr Rajkumar, Vishnuvardhan. Who were demigods to the south.
They only projected Hindi cinema as Indian cinema. They described other industries as regional language cinema. They didn’t bother to pay respect to other industry films & actors. After the event, I went back to Chennai and I expressed the disappointment of my experience in a press meet,’’ concluded Chiranjeevi.
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