One well-loved personage who gave the Directorate of Film Festivals (DFF) a royal ditch is Malayalam movie superstar Mammootty.

A truly good actor, who has deservedly garnered critical accolades and popular adulation in his career, he did his stature no justice by laying down a completely unreasonable precondition when the IFFI organisers extended him an invitation to be one of two guests of honour at the closing ceremony.

Mammootty insisted that he would not share the stage with anybody else, no matter who he or she was. At that point, Mithun Chakraborty's name hadn't cropped up officially. The person who was the first to be approached to do the honours was Satyajit Ray's alter ego, Soumitra Chatterjee.

The Bengali actor said he was unavailable due to his theatre commitments. It was only then that Mammootty came into the frame. Marathi filmmaker Jabbar Patel's help was sought to get the word across to the Malayali superstar, who had played the historical protagonist in Patel's biopic "Ambedkar".

Mammootty first accepted the invitation, but then obviously had second thoughts. As things panned out, he was absent from the stage despite his name having been formally announced by the IFFI organisers. Wonder whether it was really the prospect of rubbing shoulders with Mithun that put Mammootty off.

He would have done well to remember that had he turned up in Goa he would have shared the stage with the likes of Chilean film director Miguel Littin and French film director Alain Corneau.

So the no-show was probably more his loss than IFFI's.