RGV Blog

I am posting the first look of ‘Rakht Charitra’ on some visuals cut on a theme song in here along with my take as a Director.

Director’s Note

This story is inspired from the life of Paritala Ravi from South India who was assassinated in January, 2005. Even though the actual incidents of the story happened and the related characters existed in South India, I decided to make it in Hindi because I strongly felt that the sheer uniqueness of the story deserves to be told to a much wider audience.

Paritala Ravi was arguably the most feared individual ever in the history of the blood-ridden faction politics of South India. He was a prime accused in innumerable murder cases and also survived numerous assassination attempts, the most brutal of which happened on a quiet Friday afternoon in November 1997 when a road near Rama Naidu Studio in Hyderabad was turned into a death field by a bomb which killed 26 people but failed to get its intended target Ravi.

I, in the course of my life have read biographies of various people and have also come to know through various sources the life stories of many highly dangerous men but all those stories pale in comparison to Ravi’s life story.

How Ravi, a soft-spoken shy guy under a force of certain circumstances retreated into the jungles, became a rebel and how he mounted a volcano of violence to avenge his father’s and brother’s deaths and how in time he became a folklore legend and eventually a minister in N.T. Ramarao’s Cabinet, reads more grippingly than any fiction writer anywhere in the world can ever imagine.

Ravi’s name sent shivers up the spines of not only his rivals but even the law enforcement agencies. He was a rebel, a feudal lord, a robin hood, a killer of hundreds and saviour of thousands till the day he was gunned down by a death squad allegedly put together by his arch rival Suri, who wanted to avenge his father’s and brother’s deaths, in a bizarre déjà vu.

I have been following Ravi’s rise to power since long, but I first heard of Suri only after the bomb explosion at Rama Naidu Studios. I was both amazed and chilled to see that even after being confined to a prison cell, how the fire of Suri’s vengeance continued to burn unabated for 7 long years till he finally succeeded, armed with nothing but a severe desire to kill Ravi as his one and only weapon.

In my research for the film I have met various associates of Paritala Ravi and Suri and also their family members. I have also met Suri who was lodged in Anantpur jail on trial for the killing of Ravi and what I finally managed to piece together from all the various police records and eye witness accounts is the most fascinating story I have ever heard or could hope to hear in my life. This is the story of a man’s phenomenal rise to power and a story of the most intense blood curdling conflict ever heard of between 2 individuals and it is also the ultimate statement on the oft heard disastrous consequences of a fatal mixture of caste, crime, family feuds and politics.

I decided to film this story at one stretch and release it in two parts about 3 months from each other, a first of its kind ever attempted in the history of Indian cinema. I wanted to call the films RakhtCharitra and RakhtCharitra – 2. Why I wanted to make it in two parts is because the sheer drama and content the story possesses is so incredibly rich and of such high magnitude that it is not possible to do justice to it in a film which is lesser than 4 to 5 hours. Also Ravi’s life can be broadly divided into two parts, from the time how circumstances created his rise to how he created circumstances that felled him.

YouTube Link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_LoSoD4CgCA