Balachandran Chullikkad (born 30 July 1957) is an Indian poet, orator, lyricist and actor in Malayalam-language.
Balachandran Chullikkad | |
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![]() Balachandran Chullikkad | |
Born | S. Balachandran (1957-07-30) 30 July 1957 (age 65) Paravoor, Kerala, India |
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Balachandran was born in Paravur, Ernakulam, Kerala, India.[1] He completed his graduation in English literature from the Union Christian College, Aluva (first two years) and Maharajas College, Ernakulam.[2]
His collection of poems published are Pathinettu Kavithakal, Amaavaasi, Ghazal, Maanasaantharam, Dracula etc. A collection of his complete poems, Balachandran Chullikkadinte Kavithakal (The Poems of Balachandran Chullikkad, 2000) was published by DC Books, Kottayam, Kerala, India. They have also published the book of his memoirs, Chidambarasmarana (2001).[citation needed]
He has participated in many national literary seminars organised by Central Academy of Letters, India. He was one among the ten members of a cultural delegation of India to Sweden in 1997 invited by Nobel Academy and Swedish Writers Union.[citation needed] He represented Indian poetry in the international bookfair in Gotenborg, Sweden in November 1997.[citation needed]
Chullikkad is also an actor in Malayalam films and serials.[3][4] As an actor, he is best known for G. Aravindan's Pokkuveyil (1981) in which he played a young artist who lives with his father, a radical friend and a music-loving young woman. The film is about how his world collapses when his father dies, the radical friend leaves him and her family takes the woman away to another city.[5]
In 2018, he criticised the state education department for their incompetency in teaching Malayalam language.[citation needed] He urged it to remove his poems from curricula in schools, colleges and universities. Chullikkadu alleged that marks were being given in abundance for papers containing mistakes without proper evaluation, and the appointment of Malayalam teachers are not on the basis of qualifications, but caste, religion, political influence and nepotism. He said research work on Malayalam literature lack quality and that doctoral degrees were conferred on even those works which contain mistakes.[6][7]
In 2000, he took Buddhism as his religion.[8] He says that this cannot be called a conversion from Hinduism because he was never a follower of that religion. "I have not converted because I have not been a believer though I was a Hindu. I have now embraced Buddhism, not converted to Buddhism. The problem with Hinduism is that it is a religion of social status and set-ups. Your value in Hinduism depends on the family in which you were born," he says.[9]
In a 2000 interview, Chullikkadu revealed that he was a sympathizer of the Naxalite movement during his teenage years. He then continued as a Marxist for some years. But after the fall of the Soviet Union and "the Eastern European experience", he rethought his conviction about Marxism and reorganised his intellectual life on a different path. "I found that Marxism is outdated and irrelevant. Now I am not a Marxist, but a social and political democrat. Soviet experience proved that individual freedom without the base of socialism and socialism without sanctioning individual freedom is a failure. Communism practised all over the world is some kind of socialism without sanctioning individual freedom. Communism without approving individual freedom is social fascism", he said.[10]
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