In one of her shows, journalist Palkhi Sharma Upadhyay was talking about the OTT platforms which have good patronage not only among youngsters to watch current cinema but also among senior citizens who like to revisit some of their old favourite movies and stars that they enjoyed watching in their prime. She is very true because I truly enjoy revisiting some of the best movies of yesteryear (of course, I do watch the current films also and can equally appreciate them).

In Hindi, I have absolutely no problem accessing those movies because all the leading OTT platforms have all the films that I want to see without any difficulty, and the prints are also very good. The sound is slightly low, but I don’t feel it because soft dialogues suit me better.

When I started searching for Tamil films ranging from the 70s, I was shocked to discover that these films are not to be found on the OTT platform at all. I could not find a single film by the then ace director Shreedhar on any of the OTT platforms. They are all available on YouTube, but the quality is very poor and, of course, there are advertisements popping up every fifth minute.

Apart from Shreedhar, K Balachandar, who ruled the film industry for nearly four decades and had created innumerable stars, was not seen anywhere at all. Even though films starring Kamal Haasan and Rajinikanth are available on YouTube with horrible prints, I couldn't find them on any of these platforms.

I am a person who is very perseverant. So, I enrolled for a one month membership in the Sunnxt OTT platform, imagining that it is owned by the great Sun TV network and that they would have a good number of films which are fit to be archived. I was in for a shock because there were more Telugu films than Tamil films. Even modern-day hero films were scarce, with only the most recent ones available, which were, of course, unwatchable.

Even songs from old films on YouTube are faded and not bright. While all the Hindi numbers are crystal clear, it is not the case with Tamil songs. Raja Jani is a Hindi film released in 1972 starring Hema Malini and Dharmender. I could watch good prints of the songs. The same film was remade in Tamil and released in 1983. When I saw the songs, they were totally destroyed and smudged and I could not identify Sri Devi at all.

Another shocker for me was that Sunnxt has a handful of the latest films by Kamal Haasan – among which I saw his VasoolRaja M B B S. First, the print was horrible, the sound was absolutely poor, and still worse, the movie was edited. I don’t know why and for what? My husband, whose memory of movies is not as good as mine, said that there were several scenes that were deleted because the editing was so glaring and it was quite unnecessary.

When I was a journalist, whenever I had to go back to history and archived films, there was one PRO named Film News Anandan—a poor man who, on his own interest, collected all information about films and actors and maintained photographs of the films. But now there is no such person either.

Shah Rukh Khan, through his Red Chillies Entertainment company, has got the rights to all his movies—his massive hits and his misses—all the films are on both Netflix and Amazon Prime and the prints are truly amazing. If SRK says he loves cinema and it is his passion, I can understand that he speaks the truth because he has preserved every film of his—even the ones in which he appeared as a cameo. I couldn't go to the theatres to watch them during his superstardom due to personal issues, but now that I'm at home, I can watch the ones I missed with a full sense of gratification.

Kamal Haasan, who had always called himself a person passionate about cinema and had said many a time that he lives and breathes cinema, has just not bothered to archive his own films and his mentor K Balachandar’s films. Even Rajinikanth owes this much dedication to K Balachandar. The best way to preserve any person’s memory is to cherish the work, because a creator like KB should be left for posterity. This is the least they both could do to cherish the memory of the man, KB, who made both of them. If K Balachandar had not identified them, I wonder what would have been the career of these two stars who ruled cinema for three decades. This is a very shameful act, and as a Tamilian, I am really ashamed that this state does not respect the craft of film making and is not interested in preserving the legacy of great makers of yesteryears.

La Trobe University, Australia, holds a Hindi film festival every year , and I see many young people there, cheering for SRK and his older films from the 1990s and 2000s. I was truly amazed to see that in Australia, as SRK was repeating his dialogues, the entire audience was saying all the lengthy dialogues along with him.

In Tamil Nadu, they claim that Tamil films have a fantastic market in the west, and people throng to the theatres to see these great stars. If they are indeed that popular, then why isn’t anybody inviting these people and honouring them? No, the big question that arises is whether Tamil films truly have a market away from Tamil Nadu at all? Or is it a big fat lie because no one can beat us in this one area?