When the Building Came Alive

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Kasturi Dhama Apartments — the play area where many evenings came alive. The lights would go out without warning. For a brief second, the entire building would fall silent. Then, from somewhere in Kasturi Dhama Apartments, a chorus would erupt. “Yayyy!” It is difficult to imagine children celebrating a power failure today. But in the Bangalore of the nineties and early 2000s, a power cut did not always feel like an inconvenience. Especially in the late evenings, it felt like permission. Permission to stop whatever we were doing, leave the darkness inside our homes, and step into the building outside. Before Kasturi Dhama became home, we had moved through a few different parts of Bangalore. My family had begun in Srirampuram and Vyalikaval before gradually cementing ourselves in Malleswaram for the next few decades. My earliest memory is of living in a vatara —a Kannada word loosely used for a building or a cluster of homes—on 15th Cross, near Karur Vy...
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Neat adaptation - Da Vinci Code unravels!

The outcome of the movie version of the hugely successful book The Da Vinci Code was eagerly awaited. It is not an easy task to generate frames in perfect adaptation to what was conceived in the book. It requires a lot of planning and skill to etch such a movie. Ron Howard must be feeling happy at the end of the day, as he has done full justice to the movie. The critics might argue that it maybe a good adaptation, but not a perfect adaptation. True, but they should know that the movie lasts only for two and a half hours, and it is no easy task to churn out close to a 1000 pages into a movie in the given time frame.

The story of the book is no secret as it has made big news in almost all the newspapers around the world a couple of years back. Dan Brown brought out a highly controversial topic, and the pros and cons of the theme are discussed even today with the same fervour. Everybody knows the book is unputdownable, and so the movie had to live upto the expectations of the millions of readers. Silas, Saunniere, Langdon, Neveu and Teabing are picturised in exactly the same way as what one would have of them in mind after reading the book. There are particular scenes in the movie where one would expect the finer details to be addressed, but fails to do so. In the beginning scene, when Langdon is brought to the Louvre to "help" the French police solve the murder mystery of the curator, one would have expected something about The Vitruvian Man. But sadly, there is not even a mention of it. There are many such places which are toned down, but obviously there is no choice but to exclude them in a two hour venture.

Tom Hanks, as Robert Langdon, is perfect. He fits the role to a nicety. Audrey Tautou, as Sophie Neveu has done a good job. But the biggest credit must go to Paul Bettany for his role as Silas. His varied emotions throughout the movie are well captured. Overall a nice movie, and while watching, one is not taken to wilderness with respect to the book as it absolutely follows the plot of Dan Brown. It is better to read the book and then watch the movie. It would also save the audience the trouble of I couldn't understand half the things in this movie.


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