The director revealed during a promo drive for The Paradise that Ram Charan forgot all about a gift he handed him on the last day of the Rangasthalam shoot.
Srikanth Odela is neck-deep in post-production on Nani's The Paradise right now, but he still made time to shoot a promo drive with the film's antagonist, Raghav Juyal, and somewhere in that conversation he let slip a detail that's now doing the rounds online.
On the last day of the Rangasthalam shoot, Ram Charan called Odela over and handed him a locket. Not just any locket, either. It was one Megastar Chiranjeevi had originally got designed for Charan in Chennai, and Charan passed it straight on to his young assistant director.
At the time, Odela wasn't directing anything. He was working under Sukumar, handling the costume department on Rangasthalam. Whatever the gesture meant to Charan back then, it clearly meant more to Odela. He says he has not taken the locket off since, not for a single day.
Here's the twist. When Odela ran into Charan recently and brought up the locket, expecting maybe a smile of recognition, Charan drew a blank. He'd completely forgotten he ever gave it away.
It's a small story, but it's landed with Telugu film Twitter the way these things do, because it says something about the gap between how a gesture lands on the giver versus the person who carries it around for years. For Charan, it was probably one gift among hundreds handed out over a long, expensive shoot. For Odela, it became something he wore through the years he spent climbing from assistant director to a name people now recognise on his own films.
Odela's rise since Rangasthalam has been quick by industry standards. He went from managing costumes on set to directing his own films, and The Paradise, with Nani in the lead and Raghav Juyal playing the antagonist, is his latest. The promo push for the film is now in full swing, car-drive interviews and all, with the director and his co-star doing the rounds together to build buzz ahead of release.
No release date has been confirmed in the reporting around this story, and there's no word yet on whether Charan and Odela have spoken about the locket since that awkward, funny reunion. What's clear is that Odela isn't taking it off anytime soon, and Rangasthalam, seven-odd years on, still has a way of turning up in conversations about the people it made.
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