The man who guards our PM

For six hours a day, Kalamandalam Raman Kutty plays a really tough role.

He is one of those grim faced, dark-suited men you see hovering around the Prime Minister. His job is to ensure that no saboteur can get within sniffing distance of his Z+ category ward.

For the rest of the day, the SPG sub inspector plays even tougher roles: Bhima, Duryodhana, Rama, Arjun, any of the epic Kathakali characters in fact. Trained under the brutally vigorous regimen of the Kalamandalam School for Kathakali, this 48-year SI finds all those early dawns spent in dance drill a blessing as he stays on his feet around the nation’s most vulnerable terror targets.

“This is a career and I am committed to it but I trained in Kathakali for eight years and I didn’t want to let go the skill. So whenever and wherever I can, I dance,” says Kutty who has been with the SPG for eight years now.

It is not an easy job being part of an ultra-elite crack team. The SPG is assigned not only to the serving Prime Minister and his family, but also former PMs and their kin. Duty could call Kutty or any of his SPG teammates to the city’s most heavily guarded homes — those of the PM, the Gandhi family, and AB Vajpayee among others.

Kutty’s own skills are technical, he specialises in anti-sabotage measures. And his assignment requires not just a lot of desk work but also extreme alertness. This last one week has been particularly bad with netas haring around Lutyen’s Delhi in the post-poll result scramble.

“You have to keep a suitcase ready to rush off with your team wherever your VVIP’s work or leisure takes you,” says Kutty. A lesser man would perhaps find this enough adrenaline rush to want to put on the Kathakali warpaint and dance in his spare time. But love for Kathakali — often called bhrand (mania or madness) in Kerala — is an addiction that is tough for both connoisseurs and performers to wean themselves off.

Kutty started training under the masters at Kalamandalam at 13. In those days it meant abandoning school education because the dance training had to be rigorous and all-consuming. (Thanks to some realistic thinking, today young students at Kalamandalam are allowed to balance the dance curriculum with school education). It was only after completing his masters in Kathakali that Kutty could look at getting a school certificate.

The offers to travel around the world and perform came in soon after he graduated under the mentorship of the great guru Kalamandalam Raman Kutty Nair. But at 23, it dawned on Kutty that his art could not really get him a steady income. “How many in a class of 100 students can actually make a career out of Kathakali? I really had no choice but let go of dancing and take up a job with the CRPF from where I was picked for SPG. But for 10 years, I had to snap all ties with dance and that was painful,” recalls Kutty.

Funny as it might sound, Kutty’s stint at the SPG has been more artistically fulfilling than any other. Work at the force may seem like a tough grind but it has encouraged him to pursue his art as much as possible.

The rest of his family, wife Rajani (who specialises in the painstaking art of chutti or make up) and teenaged twins Rajish and Remya too are into Kathakali, and together they now make four-person troupe. When he retires from work, he plans to devote his time entirely to his art.