Kaatru Veliyidai Revisited

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I just couldn’t get myself to watch Kaatru Veliyidai again, because the very thought of watching the abusive nature of Varun (VC) was making me feel really irritated! What madness is it that makes the human mind hold on to someone despite all the abusiveness!

I finally got myself to watch a few scenes some time last year and, before I knew it, I got hooked big time to the magic of ARR & Mani Ratnam. What music and what visuals!

It is one thing to portray the initial happy days of a simple relationship, like in Alaipayuthey and OK Kanmani, where the relationship itself is yet to really begin. But it is quite a task to portray a complex relationship like that of VC and Leela’s, which is synonymous with everything but happiness.
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Kurumugil Song & Gujarat Marvels

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In recent times, if there was a movie that I really wanted to watch after seeing all the initial trailers, it had to be Sita Ramam. It’s another fact that I didn’t watch until it got released on Amazon Prime!

Seeing the trailers and promos, all the mystery surrounding the whereabouts of Ram apart, there was this one song that had me going back to it again and again, right from the lyric video release. The visuals, the music, the backdrop, the charming Dulquer & Mrunal – it was one of those rare songs that was very captivating, both musically and visually!

The colourful, animated butterflies flying rhythmically to the soft, opening music full of old-world charm (The role that these butterflies play in this movie, especially till the climax! Sigh!), the simple, poetic lyrics, the veena in the interludes and in the ending of many lines all through the song, the sight and sound of kids singing and dancing in chorus (do we even have such beautiful chorus in songs, nowadays?), the happy faces of Sitamahalakshmi and Ram 🙂 and, besides all these, the locations with some stunning architecture! What a beautiful setting the stepwell with all its mini-gopurams made for all the kids to run around along with the hero and the heroine!

It wasn’t until the full video of this song was released, that the magnificence of the location became fully apparent. The place fascinated me so much that Google search and much planning later, we visited the Modhera Sun Temple just to see that beautiful step well! Hearing the legend that Lord Rama and Sita once visited this place, we were wondering if that was the reason why this location was chosen to be featured in the song of our Sita Mahalakshmi and Ram. 🙂

Visiting Rani Ki Vav too along with this place, I realized that the famed stepwell featured in our Rs. 100 note is also featured in this song!

The surprise came in the form of the streets of this place called Sidhpur, which we took a detour to, on a whim, on the way to Rani Ki Vav, while googling for any other places to visit nearby. Google Maps said that there was an architecturally splendid, ruined temple named Rudra Mahalaya temple. As we were travelling on the congested market roads of Sidhpur, to our surprise, my husband spotted the Europe-like streets featured right from the opening sequences of Kurumugil till the end! Wow! We had never heard about the Bohra mansions of Sidhpur. Didn’t these mansions just add on to the old-world charm brought out by the opening music in the song? No wonder camels were a part of those scenes in the song, since that part of Gujarat had its fair share of camels and camel carts!

Since visiting these places, Kurumugil has become even more close to my heart, since it no longer just takes me back to the world of Sita Mahalakshmi and Ram, but also makes me reminisce about my epic heritage trip.

Pink-necked Green Pigeon & Mynah

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This tree having red-berries (Carpentaria Palm tree?) often hosts a wide variety of birds – be it the ubiquitous mynah, the tiny sunbird, occasionally a koel and even a bird as colourful as this pink-necked green pigeon!

Here’s a mynah grabbing that red berry and running away 🙂

The Koel

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Among the sporadic posts written here in the last decade, the rain trees outside the windows of my home in Singapore have often found a mention and anyone still following this blog will know how much I love just standing and staring at those trees, taking in the greenery, the sight of the birds inhabiting it and the sleeping leaves as the sun starts to set. During silent times like weekday day times, I often have the chirping of birds for company. While orioles and mynahs are regulars, the woodpeckers, parrots and koels are the occasional inhabitants of these trees. A koel seems to have recently made a tree its home and, thus, I have been waking up to the beautiful singing of the koel every morning. A nice way to begin the day, isn’t it?

Unblock the block

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I was reading some time back about how to unblock the writer’s block. Reading the point which talked about remembering the intention behind why one started to write had me getting back my inspiration in a flash. After all, I am still as passionate about all the things that I was passionate about back when I started to write and it was to share more about those passions that I started to write.

New Year Resolutions

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I had started writing this on January 2nd and had just written down the next two paragraphs when Murphy struck even before I could finish all that I wanted to write and thus, this too ended up as a draft like several other posts lying unpublished! Anyway, now that I thought it’s better to restart again, I am posting this now.

I have never been a person who has successfully stuck to new year resolutions, since I can’t keep up at anything beyond a few weeks. But, new year or not, every time I come back to Singapore from a trip to Madras, I come back with an increased level of motivation and inner energy and thus, end up sticking to some new small daily goals (just another way of saying resolution 🙂 ) for a few weeks. I usually stick to those till the sameness of the everyday routine gets on to me or till the feeling of missing my home that is Madras intensifies.

Anyway, getting back to the title of this post, tapping into the energy I have got from just returning from India, I am planning to take up some resolutions for January and first among them is the daily goal of writing something here, be it two lines or two hundred lines, it doesn’t matter. Wish me luck, folks! Wishing you all a very happy new year and tons of luck in getting all your goals, big and small, accomplished.

Sita Ramam – The Experience

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*SPOILERS AHEAD*

As the last scene of Sita Ramam unfolded, I was struck with the realization that how much Roja appears to be a complete fantasy, though I know that it was inspired by a real-life story.

A couple of years back, my then 8-year old daughter refused to watch the movie beyond the scene where Arvind Samy is abducted by the terrorists, since she found it very scary. This was coming from a child who usually watches a lot of movies, though, mostly the masala movies which I usually don’t like. Since then, every time I mentioned Roja, she has always said that she won’t watch it.
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Learning in the age of Googling

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Last year, my son started primary school. Within a few weeks, he wanted to know why one had to go to school to learn stuff when the answer to everything can be found in Google! Thankfully, the reply I gave convinced him to some extent. I asked him how Google got to know everything and he didn’t have an answer. That’s when I told him that he should go to school and study so that he can teach Google the things it doesn’t know and make Google do even more things.

Even as I told him these words, I started to ponder about how learning about anything and everything under the sun has become so easy now, all thanks to Google. But has it really become easy?

Gone are the days when one could confidently say that they didn’t know something. Be it cooking a new dish or finding the way to a small shop in a new city in an unfamiliar country or getting to know the plot of a movie or learning a complex Maths concept or clearing primary school grammar doubts or mastering a new yoga asana or, for that matter, even parenting, one ends up turning to Google for everything from education to entertainment.

For me, the year 2021 has been a year of learning. As I wrote in the opening paragraph, last year my son started going to full day primary school. Suddenly, I was left with a good chunk of uninterrupted 5 hours. In a bid to get back to refreshing my technical skills and updating myself on the latest technologies and programming languages, I started utilizing the time to study. After all, everything was only a Google Search away.

But I found myself feeling overwhelmed with a lot of stuff – Cloud, Java, Python, R, Statistics, Data Analytics, Geographic Information System, Probability, Regression, SQL, Javascript, Scratch Programming and what not. Each time I didn’t understand something, I found myself jumping from one website or a YouTube video to another before finding THAT correct resource which would make me understand the concept or the sequences clearly. While I was learning whatever I set out to learn about, some time was also getting wasted in the hunt for the correct learning resource. It took me a while to pause, come out of the enthusiasm and start focussing on one thing at a time.

That is when the realization that, how in this world of multitasking and information overload, it is easy to lose oneself and end up setting unreasonable expectations. But, with proper planning and focus, it is indeed easy to learn so much without any hassle whatsoever.

Be it Microsoft’s Learn Programme or Google’s ‘Digital Garage’ or Oracle Academy or any of the huge number of MOOCs and the YouTube videos, there is a whole lot of highly informative and well-structured free learning resources available out there.

Of course, it isn’t just in the field of software engineering and development alone that these resources are there. If you only you choose to focus, research, pause and concentrate, you too can embark on a beautiful learning journey on any field of your choice.

Happy Learning!