Anyone who walks around proudly with “Crazy” prefixed to his name must definitely be crazy. Not too many who followed Tamil dramas or films knew him by his real name — Mohan Rangachari — but just mention Crazy, and their faces would light up as they recalled some joke that Crazy Mohan had cracked.

Crazy Mohan, who died of a cardiac arrest today, was 66. He is survived by his wife and two sons.

With an unruly mop of thinning hair, spectacles, dressed in a T-shirt with the sleeves rolled up just that bit and what could pass off as track pants, you could identify Crazy Mohan from his inimitable voice and the Brahmin lingo. He was a larger-than-life figure for millions of his fans. He made his name writing rip-roaring dramas. The storyline hardly mattered, what the audience were engrossed in was the steady flow of one-liners. You laugh too loudly and too long for one, you are bound to miss the next one that came almost instantly.

With his younger brother 'Maadhu' Balaji, Crazy Mohan formed a deadly team and Crazy Creations, his drama troupe, came up with many Tamil dramas that most would have watched more than once. Crazy Creations was more a family than a drama troupe, Crazy Mohan would say.

He had made his mark as a dramatist long before he made his appearance in Tamil movies, through Kamal Haasan's Apoorva Sahodarargal , in which he played a cameo, as he did in many other Kamal movies, where he had written the dialogues. Sathi Leelavathi , Michael Madana Kama Rajan (MMKR), Avvai Shanmugi , Tenali , Pammal K Sambandam , Panchathantiram were some of the movies that Crazy Mohan handled the dialogues or the screenplay. His punchy dialogues, combined with Kamal's timing and dialogue delivery, made them memorable.

In all his plays, the lead female actor's name was Janaki. The reason: that was the name of Crazy Mohan's favourite school teacher. He once told  BusinessLine  staff — when he spent what was supposed to be an hour chatting with us and which extended to more than two hours, without the conversation once losing tempo — that he owed a lot to his school teacher and what better way to pay a tribute to her than name his heroines after her.

Crazy Mohan's strength was his command over what is still known as Madras Tamizh, even though the city itself has been renamed Chennai. "Each part of the city had its own slang and twang," he would remark. He would capture them all and Kamal would deliver them with aplomb.

If Kamal gave that extra flourish to Crazy's dialogues on screen, it was Crazy Mohan's brother 'Maadhu' Balaji who did that on stage.

Crazy's humour was harmless. No double-meaning lines or below-the-belt punches. Not even politically incorrect ones. He showed that you needn't poke fun at others to make people laugh: there were many other ways to do it.

It was all in Tamil and only those who knew the language well or the social milieu in Tamil Nadu could follow him. Take for instance, a scene when the family is debating what to name a new-born male baby. When all others are struggling with whether the baby should be named after the grandfather or be given a modern name, Crazy Mohan, in all seriousness which only he can muster, wonders why the baby should not be named ' maama ' — Tamil for uncle and also how one addresses an elderly male. After all, Crazy Mohan reasons, some day, someone is going to call him ' maama '.

Or, that scene in the Tamil movie Indian starring Kamal Haasan, where an indignant Crazy Mohan, when asked to pay a bribe at the transport office, says he will write a Letters to the Editor in  The Hindu ! Or, that “I mean what I mean...” sequence in MMKR.

During his interaction with a few  BusinessLine  staffers in our office a little over a year ago, he recalled how he was holed up in Rajnikanth's house while writing the screenplay for Arunachalam. Crazy Mohan, who loved chewing betel leaves and tobacco, could not go down to spit them out because Rajni's dogs would be downstairs. And, without spitting out the betel leaf, Crazy Mohan's creative juices would not flow. Understanding his plight, Rajni gave him a spittoon. He was struggling to come up with a punch dialogue — a trademark of all Rajni films — and finally came up with one that gave the superstar immense satisfaction.

A mechanical engineering graduate from College of Engineering, Guindy, Mohan worked in a TVS group company, whose office was in Padi, then a distant suburb. He would say his scooter ride back home in the evenings was made miserable by the stray dogs. Crazy Mohan, who was mortally scared of dogs, used to joke that it appeared as if the dogs were taking turns waiting for him at different corners. He would remark that he quit working because he was so scared of the stray dogs. Tamil drama buffs and movie goers were the biggest gainers. He gave them his undivided attention!

Crazy Mohan made us laugh. And, he made us recall each and every one of his jokes and one-liners time and again. One assumes that is how he would like to be best remembered.

Rest in Peace, Crazy!

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