Story of a Pearl

In olden days,the only method of collecting pearls was by manually diving to the sea and gathering large numbers of pearl oysters from the ocean floor.And for generations sea divers withstood all the obstacles and collected pearls from deep sea.History says that around 550 B.C there was a large amount of pearl divers in India.

Most of the people might not have seen a movie about deep sea divers in India.Ya, there is one movie which was made in 80's in South of India which was directed by a master film maker called Shankar Nag starring Dr.Rajkumar as the protagonist.The name of the movie is "Ondu Muthina Kahte" which literally means "Story of a Pearl".The movie is loosely based on John Steinbeck's English novel "The Pearl". The movie tells a story of small community in Karnataka,South India which depends on pearls for their livelihood.Most of the men and women are uneducated but well versed in sea diving.As they are uneducated,they are easily cheated by the traders. One day he finds a big,shiny pearl in the sea.Suddenly many of his friends turns in to enemies and tries to have it but it somehow reaches back to him.Finally he gets disappointed by the human greed and throws it back to sea.


Highlight of the movie is underwater sequence which was shot without oxygen in Maldives island with a German cameraman.(I heard Shankar Nag saying it in his last interview).The camera was brought from Canada and in one scene there is fight between lead actor and an Octopus which is brilliantly shot(May be animotronics...its my wild guess..it has to be because there was no computer graphics in 80's).It is really a masterpiece but forgotten and of course master performance by Dr.Rajkumar who was around 60 years of age at that time (amazingly he looks fit..thanks to his Yoga habits).In entire movie he wore nothing but small skimpy dress.(I dont think any Indian "superstars" will do that nowadays except few). Music is composed by L.Vaidyanathan who worked with Shankar Nag in classic Malgudi Days which is beautifully rendered by Dr.Rajkumar and S.Janaki. We cinema lovers really miss Shankar Nag."Please come back and enlighten the present generation of fim makers".