Mangaluru: A Tulu short film inspired by a freak incident of 2015 is a big hit on social media. The 12.20 minute flick written and directed by Mumbai based filmmaker Ganesh Shetty has already clogged 240,976 views on You Tube in the week since it was first http://canaranews.com/uploaded on 11th April

Titled ‘Paroksh’, the film is a fictionalized depiction of a ‘ghost story’ which was reported from Kundapura taluk of Udupi district on Jul 25, 2015. Every night for a few days, the family of one Govinda of Vandse village was haunted by the blood curdling cries of a baby, which seemed to come from a coconut tree in the vicinity. The mystified folks were so sacred by the chilling phenomenon they even spent a fortune to hire a black magic expert to ward off evil spirits which might be residing in the coconut tree.

Few days later a local coconut tree climber visited the house to reclaim his mobile phone handset, which he had forgetfully left on the tree top. The baby’s cries were actually the ringtone of the mobile phone and he too had forgotten where he had left it. So what started with a scream had ended with a laugh. This incident had made big news at that time especially because of the way in which a gullible poor man got ripped off due to superstitious beliefs.

Ganesh Shetty, who hails from a village called Belvai near Moodbidri, left for Mumbai at the age of 16 with only big dreams in his pocket. This was sometime in the mid-nineties. He was an eighth standard school dropout and like many others, worked as a tea boy. Then while working in the canteen of Adlabs, a famous film processing unit, he got his first peek into the movie industry and he made the transition to Bollywood. Again as an errand boy; there was no change in his status

The film was initially funded by Ganesh Shetty’s own savings. But when the whopping budget of Rs. 16.5 lakhs became too much for him to bear, timely help came from Manish Mundra of Drishyam Films, an NRI movie mogul and a knight in shining armour for independent filmmakers. Producer Manish Trehan too backed him.