A work in constant progress (and occasional regress).
Alias:
Abdullah Periyar Dasan
Periyardasan
Seshachalam
Birthplace:
North Arcot, Tamil Nadu, India
Born:
August 21, 1949
Died:
August 19, 2013
Periyar Dasan was an eminent speaker and activist from Tamil Nadu. He was a Tamil Scholar and thinker. He propagated Atheism and Rationalist ideologies for most part of his life. He has also appeared in Tamil-language films. He had acted in around 15 films, starting with Karuthamma. Born in a shaivite family he was attracted towards the rationalist ideals of Periyar E. V. Ramasamy founder of the Dravidian movement. During his days in Pachaiyappa’s college, he changed his original name Seshachalam to Periyar Dasan ('Ardent follower of Periyar'). He well versed in Tamil literature, various religious studies and English and he has authored around 120 books. He was served as a professor in his alma mater, Pachaiyappa’s college, for 34 years. In 1991, Periyar Dasan embraced Buddhism and added Siddartha as a prefix to his name. He translated the Dhammapada, a compilation of Buddhist virtues, authored by BR Ambedkar, into Tamil. This took him to learn Pali and Sanskrit. Taking everyone by surprise, he embraced Islam as his way of life on 11 March 2010 during a visit to Mecca and rechristened his name as ‘Abdulla Periyardasan’. Thereafter, he started giving a series of lectures on Islam. Before embracing Islam, he spent 10 years in knowing the key aspects of that religion and learning the Holy Quran and the Arabic language. Since 2004, he stopped his propagation of atheism.
Most data and links to images for the Movies section come from TheMovieDB (TMDB).
Additional data for Film Titles come from The Open Movie Database (OMDb).
At least one plug-in comes from IMDb.
Data are -- hey, it's a plural -- subject to the limitations of their sources. (For example, TMDB search results currently max out at 20.) I am limiting myself to free data sources for now. (No, a "free trial" is not free.)
While much of the above data are retrieved directly from outside APIs and other such sources, data from American Film Institute (AFI) and British Film Institute (BFI) were manually entered the old fashioned way into a MySQL database. Re BFI I took the following liberties:
Regarding profile removals and data corrections:
Filtering is applied here to film projects flagged as "adult" by TheMovieDB. Pending "popular demand" I am contemplating a login and profile system with preferences (such as whether to allow adult images to appear) and permissions (such as data entry).
Whereas the overall purpose of this website is to serve as a personal demo/portfolio/workshop of web and data skills, this Movies section is not meant to compete with or substitute for far more definitive movie websites.
Whether or not he still clings to an award which he won in 1986 as a film critic for his college's newspaper, Jeffrey Hartmann is not responsible for the texts of overviews and biographies supplied by external data sources.