Mammootty turned 75 on Sunday, and among the tributes was one that had nothing to do with cinema at all.

Ramesh Pisharody, the Palakkad MLA and a familiar face on Mammootty's travels for years, opened up about the advice the actor gave him before he contested the Palakkad assembly seat. The two men, Pisharody pointed out, sit on opposite sides of the political fence. Mammootty leans toward the Left. Pisharody, like producer Anto Joseph, is a Congress man. And yet, he said, politics comes up between them often.

According to Pisharody's account, reported by Oneindia Malayalam, Mammootty's advice ahead of the polls was direct: don't contest on the strength of being a film actor. Go in with a guarantee that you will actually work among the people. There will be others in that constituency who have spent decades in politics, Mammootty reportedly told him, and sincerity in the job matters more than the résumé you walk in with.

Pisharody said their political conversations never curdle into arguments, even when the two are clearly not voting the same way. He called it an exchange of ideas rather than a disagreement, adding that he's genuinely unsure what the right word for it even is. Debate, maybe. Not a quarrel, in any case.

What struck him more, he said, was how little the friendship resembles ordinary friendship. There's a formality to it, a respect that keeps things from tipping into the kind of banter where anything goes. Mammootty, in his telling, isn't a man stuck in old habits. He tracks what's current and acts on it, something Pisharody says still catches him off guard.

On the professional side, Pisharody pushed back on any idea that Mammootty has reinvented himself lately by picking riskier, non-commercial films alongside his mainstream work. That's not new, he said. It's the same pattern the actor has run since long before this current phase of his career got noticed for it, alternating between the two lanes without ever really choosing one over the other.

The birthday tributes also revived a smaller, older piece of Kochi trivia. The iron footbridge connecting Panampilly Nagar and Girinagar, on the route to the first house Mammootty ever bought in the city, was renamed Mammootty Bridge by the Kochi Corporation back in 2021. The actor sold that original house, called Surumaa, years ago. The bridge stayed.

What Pisharody's account leaves open is whether that advice about ground-level work and sincerity is something the actor extends to other public figures who've asked him, or whether this was specific counsel for a specific election. Either way, it's a rare glimpse of Mammootty as a political sounding board, not a screen presence, on a birthday otherwise crowded with the usual tributes.