New Delhi: Over 50 award winners did not turn up at the presentation ceremony of the National Film Awards 2018 held on May 3. They were boycotting the event to express their displeasure over the fact that President Ram Nath Kovind would be handing out the awards to only a few of the recipients, as opposed to the tradition of personally handing out the awards to all the winners.At the presentation function, while the president gave away just 11 of the 137 awards, minister for information and broadcasting Smriti Irani and minister of state Rajyavardhan Rathore presented the remaining.Apropos of the incident, Academy Award winning sound technician Resul Pookutty wrote an indignant post on Facebook describing the unjust and unfair ways in which the awards were handed out.He wrote that the president said there were over 200,000 people working directly or indirectly for the film industry. Pookutty said that most of those who did not turn up for the felicitation ceremony consisted of the majority that form the backbone of the industry.Hon.President also mentioned that there are 200,000/ people directly and many more indirectly working in the film industry. Yes that is true… most of the people who abstained from the ceremony yesterday consists of the majority of that 200,000 . They are the work force… they work behind the camera, they carry heavy lights, they carry heavy equipments, they swing booms, they push trolleys, they work more than 18houres a day!. It is their sweat that earns every state Govt it’s Entertainment Tax-UP charges the highest 60% in addition to the GST @18%, though we are strictly not a service Industry. So in effect we became the highest taxed Industry!Pookutty went on to say that these hardworking technicians were sidelined at the function. Citing examples of V. Santaram and Bhanu Athaiya, he said that it was the technicians who had put Indian cinema on the international map and yet, it was only the stars who were recognised. He said that the award ceremony should have been rescheduled so that the president could have handed over the award personally to each of the recipients:We felt bad because when Your good office chose from the bottom of the list it was only the stars and star elements got picked up! Or those 11 people could have been the young and first time awardees! We would have clapped in joy at Your choice… We felt bad because the people who got left out were those raw people, the technicians who are always called first in every award ceremony and edited out in every TV shows. Stars don’t care us, business don’t care us, we thought our nation would care us!The National Award is our nation’s highest recognition, being recognized at Hon. President’s hand is our privilege, our honour and our dream!.But I felt the Nation’s sentiment got left out in the choices that were made yesterday, for its the technicians who always gets the raw deal!.Pookutty ended his post by saying that he was sorry if he was out of line, that he was after all, a ‘sentimental ordinary Indian Film Technician’. The post has been shared over several hundred times on Facebook and screenshots of the post have been doing the rounds on Twitter as well.