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Top Bit Actor Pallana Passes by Doniphan Blair
Kumar Pallana perhaps in front of his house in the hills of Oakland. photo: K. Pallana
ALTHOUGH HE CAME FROM ELSEWHERE
—India, Texas, Las Vegas and LA, among many others, Kumar Pallana is an Oakland original and we should be overjoyed he was able to get here and spend some quality time before passing on October 10th at the healthy age of 94.
You can check out the excellent obits in the New York Times or LA Times with facts I won't be able to amplify or embellish, since a quick survey of my connections couldn't turn up one to Kumar but these are my feelings:
Yes, Tom Hanks and Clint Eastwood are Oakland's over-achieving actors—indeed, the former is going crazy with "Saving Mr. Banks", about the making of "Mary Poppins", which is about to eclipse the already stellar "Captain Phillips"—but Kumar is a true Oakland original.
In the Oakland tradition, he was not only a versatile multiculturalist who moved here from India in 1946—INCLUDING settling in Texas (that's got to be rough, although that's where he was discovered by Wes Anderson teaching yoga)—but a multi-careerist, multi-classist and multi-technologist.
"He embraced the moving and changing times of our modern age better than any 90-year-old that can be found today," Sandhya Pallana told the Associated Press (Oct17). Indeed, he adored his iPhone, drove a Prius and had tons of other gadgets—not surprising for a man who came up in the vaudeville juggling plates.
Gene Hackman and Pallana, his one time assassin and now servant, take a much-needed break from the family in "The Mighty Tenenbaums". photo: courtesy W. Anderson
As if that were not enough, he was also able to pluck a handkerchief off the ground while riding past it on a bicycle—with his teeth!
His first film was Anderson's "Bottle Rocket" (1996) where he played Kumar, his own name, a trope he continued, suggesting a certain blending of interior and external identities. Although a career highlight was playing opposite Hanks in Spielberg's "The Terminal" (2004), his most impressive part appears to be Pagoda in Anderson's 2001 offering "The Mighty Tenenbaums".
As the Tenenbaum's servant, his character first meets the father, Royal, played by Gene Hackman, as an assassin. But after stabbing Royal, Pagoda carries him on his back to the hospital (one of the many plot twists in the convoluted story) which endeared him to Royal.
At any rate, Pallana's upraising in a middleclass Indian family, his family's devastation due to politics, his failed attempt to break into Bollywood, his years busking and vaudevilling and finally his family life in Texas teaching yoga, all seemed to inform his ability to give one of the best deadpans in the business, to accept everything with utter equanimity.
To me, that is very Oakland, where he presumably moved to be both close to his final career in Hollywood and his son Dipak, with whom he lived.
And we were happy to have him: Carry on with aplomb Babaji Pallana, we will try to continue your recently acquired tradition here in Samsara.