Experiences

The movie works because the story does. So the first credit should go to Valmiki, and for the Tamil version of the movie, Kamban. These two gentlemen gave not only a solid story to work from, but pages and pages of beautiful poetry, full of metaphors, similes and poetic nuances. Suhasini’s dialogs sound fantastic because she has done a brilliant job of adapting poetry into simple rustic and colloquial language. Vairamuthu’s lyrics soar in this context. The movie is packed with delightful and fresh visual interpretations of the scenes we know so well—be it Sita pining under a tree, or Hanuman meeting her bearing Ram’s message, or a Bacchanalian celebration of the Asuras. Watch the movie for the fantastic cinematography by Santosh Sivan, if nothing else. Kamban is also responsible for the humanization of Ravanan that we see in the movie. In the Tamil Ramayanam, Ravanan is depicted as a fantastically talented man and a great king. His single weakness which leads to his eventual downfall i

An Ethiopian taxi driver in Columbus, OH, offered marriage to me. He felt that his US Citizenship made him irresistible. When I laughed, he chided me: “No no, I am serious. Take my card.” It took some amount of firmness to dissuade him. He was driving me from the Columbus airport to the Greyhound bus terminal. The meeting was at Cincinnati, but the airfares had been prohibitively expensive. So the smart of idea of flying to Columbus and taking the bus from thereon had been hatched. It was thus I landed in Columbus, bright eyed and busy tailed, on Tuesday morning. My driver handled my rejection gamely with “You Indians only marry Indians no?” He then proceeded to show me the meager and underwhelming landmarks of Columbus downtown. It was disappointing really, because from the air, Columbus looked like the modern day cousin of the “village we know so well”. There were neatly arranged houses in tidy neighborhoods everywhere. From 20,000 ft, it certainly looked like peace was reigning. But