Sreenivasan exposed our hypocrisies & made us laugh

Rarely do I feel a deep personal sense of loss at the passing of someone who was not part of my immediate life. Sreenivasan is an exception. I never met or interacted with him, yet his departure leaves behind an unusual pain. He was almost my age — an unsettling feeling of losing someone who seemed to walk alongside us through the same years.

I see him as a rare genius — one who held up a mirror to society with extraordinary honesty. It was a mirror that showed us exactly who we were, without distortion. The truths were disturbing, often uncomfortable, yet never offensive — and always delivered with humour. That was his unique gift.

No one in our lifetime exposed the hypocrisies of Malayalee society — political, social and familial — with such piercing clarity. Through his writing and performances, he revealed our contradictions exactly as they were: our moral posturing, our selective progressiveness, and our quiet compromises. And yet, we laughed. We accepted it, because the truth came wrapped in humour, with a subtle optimism.

In the characters he wrote for Sandesham, he distilled the absurdities of our political lives without anger or sermon — letting satire do the heavy lifting and trusting the audience to recognise itself.

What made his work enduring was that it never descended into cynicism. Alongside our hypocrisies, he showed our goodness — our decency, our vulnerabilities and our helplessness in the face of circumstance. He understood us deeply, perhaps better than we understood ourselves.

Even in his final phase, as illness slowly diminished his physical presence, there was a sense that he viewed life itself with the same gentle irony — accepting its fragility, its impermanence and its quiet ending.

With his passing, we lose more than an actor or writer. We lose an enabling mirror that helped society reflect, recalibrate and laugh at itself. That mirror will be missed — for a long, long time.

The author is the Founder and Executive Chairman of The IBS Group.