From Malgudi to Bangalore

From Malgudi to Bangalore, Swami has come a long way

Naveen Namboodiri
Swami is still on the move. No, he isn’t catching thieves in Malgudi or breaking windowpanes of his school any more. The small screen wonder of ’80s has grown up — from Master Manjunath to Manjunath Nayaker. Some things, though, never change. Swami is still a charmer. Cricket is still a religion for him, as was when he, along with his neighbourhood friends, painstakingly stitched together a cricket team for the Malgudi Cricket Club. As the senior manager (PR & Liaison) of Nandi Infrastructure Corridor Enterprise Limited, Manjunath Nayaker is now designing expressways and elevated monorails for traffic-choked Bangalore.

He vividly remembers his Malgudi Days. “Playing Swami was a tough challenge. I had to do justice to an immortal character created by one of India’s finest storytellers (R K Narayan). We had a grinding schedule in Agumbe near the Western Ghats, where the shooting was on. I had to learn Hindi and English, mug up pages of dialogues and shoot day in and day out. But we kids had our share of fun too,” he says. Manujunath had not read Swami and Friends then. He looked up to director Shankar Nag, who in turn put his faith in the 10-year-old boy. The off-screen chemistry they shared reflected in the success of Malgudi Days, the first Hindi TV serial to be made in South India. Malgudi Days catapulted Master Manjunath, till then known only to Kannada cine goers, into national limelight. But little did he know that he had become famous in households across the country. “I didn’t know I was famous. I didn’t know we were recreating a literary masterpiece. What I knew was that I was working for Shankar Nag. And that I had to deliver the goods. It helped in a way,” he says. Acting, however, was nothing new to Manjunath. He had donned the grease paint at age three, for a Kannada movie called Ajith. Manjunath first met Shankar Nag on the sets of Hosatirpu. After three films with Nag, Manjunath acted in the Rekha-starrer Utsav. He has since acted in 68 films, including two English, one Telugu and one Kashmiri. “Life was like a roller-coaster ride. I used to shoot extensively for months together and then return to studies. Coming from a middle-class family, money mattered. I continued acting till age 19. Then I decided that enough was enough.” Armed with an MA in Sociology, Manjunath worked for an ad agency for some time. He also had a brief stint as project leader of onlinebangalore.com. “I am still passionate about acting. But I don’t want to make it my calling,” says the actor-turned corporate executive. Manjunath cherishes a compliment he received from R K Narayan. “After all that hype over Malgudi Days, we had a party at Woodlands Hotel. Narayanan, who was present on the occasion, told me: Manju, you are exactly what I imagined Swami to be. That was the biggest recognition I had ever received.” Manjunath is all for renaming Agumbe as Malgudi. “Malgudi is a place we all can relate to. The Market Road, the snuff stalls, the Regal Hair Cutting Saloon, the Sarayu river, the railway station, Gaffur’s taxi and the reading room, all these are not just figments of Narayan’s imagination, but symbols of our picture-postcard villages.”