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...

The little neighborhood on the banks of a green river where I spent all my childhood was like a ghost town when I visited it a few years ago. The alleys were much narrower than I had remembered them, closing in, claustrophobic. The houses used to be much bigger in my childhood. Now they all seemed to have shrunk, aged. And I couldn’t find my friends. Not a single one. I sometimes wonder whether I had imagined it all. The big gang, hide-and-seek games in a cocoa grove, radio performances, ramparts of the ancient temple ruins, and lily ponds around school. “School? Oh I hated school—don’t have any pleasant memories,” said one gang member when I met her in Chennai briefly, 10 years ago. The Orkut community on my neighborhood has no familiar faces. Maybe I never existed there. Or maybe I was always a visitor, an amusing outsider. “Gosh, your Malayalam has such a strong Tamil accent! You’ll never get it right!” Being an outsider—oh, I do it well. “Do us a favor—don’t even att...