Ravi Mohan: no films until my divorce is settled

Ravi Mohan walked into a room of channel microphones at his office on Saturday afternoon and told the press he is not releasing a film, and not stepping onto a set, until his divorce is final. The decision is not a tactical pause. It is a man saying he cannot do the job anymore until the rest of his life is in order.

He has been silent for nearly two years. By his own admission, that silence was the mistake. “Ravi Mohan is very soft,” he said of himself in the third person, the way a man does when he is trying to describe what he is no longer willing to be. Whatever you tell him, he listens, he understands, he compromises. That was the version, he said, that everyone had grown used to. The version sitting at the microphone on Saturday was a different one. “I am not a soft person anymore.”

The framing was simple, and it was personal. He was not there to talk about cinema. He was there to address the audience he has worked for since 2003, the people he keeps describing as the ones who gave him his food across 23 years and a 95% success rate. He named what has been happening to him over the last two years as cyberbullying. He named the people he says are pushing it as a coordinated group with money behind it. He invited anyone who wanted to provoke him to come to his office and do it in person, face to face.

The hardest moment came when he showed the camera his own wrist. He had begun hurting himself, he said, after they stopped letting him see his children. He spoke at length about his two sons. The school fees he is still paying every term, running into 50 lakh rupees. His younger son, who sits down to play chess with him at night, and to whom he intentionally loses. The phones he said have been confiscated and the bodyguards he said are now following them to school. He looked into the camera and said his children should watch this video.

He pointed to his wrist and said this is what happens to a man who is not allowed to see his own children.

He defended Keneeshaa Francis, the singer who shared the Devi Ratna stage with him in Palakkad four days earlier, as the person who stood by him when no one else did. He said the cyber pile-on against her had driven her away, and that whoever set that pile-on in motion will hear from him. He defended his record on women by pointing to Peranmai, the 2009 film he made about a rape survivor, and the dialogue from it that still gets quoted at him today. He defended his upbringing. His mother, he said, did not raise him to treat women badly.

There were sharper claims threaded through the address, the kind that travel with defamation notices behind them. He spoke of a three-letter actress and an Idli actress whom he said had tried, years ago, to ruin three heroes in his own family. He spoke of AI-generated evidence being prepared against him, and of real evidence he says he has waiting in reserve. He spoke of a joint bank account that flagged every swipe back to his ex-wife. He spoke of being kept inside his family’s own production house “like a serial artist” and “like a snake in a basket”. Some of this will be settled in a courtroom. Some of it will not survive the next news cycle. The audience that has watched him work since the days of Thaam Thoom will sort the wheat from the chaff in its own time.

What will stay, and what was clearly the reason he called reporters in, is the announcement itself. He is not acting until the divorce is over. He does not know when his next film will release on screen. He is asking the people who have stayed with him for 23 years to wait a little longer.

He closed on something concrete. If cinema does not want him, he said, he has hands and legs. He is a trained Bharatanatyam dancer, with the Arangetram on record. He can teach. He can survive. He just needs the room to do it.

Don’t provoke him, he said. Give him a small break. He will come back.