Saturday, December 03, 2005

Our Ears Are Still Bleeding

While marooned in Trichy we decided to break the boredom by watching a Tamil movie these are not made in Bollywood but are rather a creation of the South, set in the South, with Southern actors and spoken in Tamil.

No subtitles so I don't even know what the movie is called unfortunately, we got to the threater a little late so the film had already started. The movies here work like everything else there are classes, first class gets to sit up the back, make loud comments hoot hiss and kiss as much as they like unchecked. Second class sits in the middle relatively quite and third class sits down the front suffering serious neck injury and total hearing loss by the end of the film. Walking to our gate (yes gate) to get to our seats we started to realize the super bowl size of the threatre.

Once in the theatre is pitch black except for the light the film is throwing off, we glide into our seats, cushion completely worn and thus hard as a rock (Tamil movies like most Indian movies go for 3 hrs with an intermission). The first thing that hits you is the sound so overwhelmingly loud, I spent the first 1/2 hour with my scarf stuffed into my ears (I am not joking).

Once relatively settled we got into the movie which despite being in a different language was relatively easy to follow - this is how it goes

Crazy guy kills people and then takes Polaroid - goes back to house where he has Polaroid’s of everything - his house, his friend, his doctor basically has lost memory except for flashback of women being killed and is determined to kill her killer.

Super cop in very tight shirt and voice heightening jeans traces killer from bus ticket and auto driver (bus tickets here have no details except price and auto driver's can barely decipher where you want to go). Goes to killers house, fight ensues, ties up killer and goes through his things until he finds highly detailed diary beautifully written.

Video hits style song is performed by female lead complete which rnb dancers clad in loose low crotch jeans and bling bling - the sequence has nothing to the do with the film except the lead characters are the main singer and dancer - we later saw this clip on KTV India's version of MTV

Flash back! is played as cop reads diary- crazy guy is heir to a huge Telco company, meets beautiful C (commercials) grade actress who is saint (several soft focus shots of her helping the blind and crippled children pepper the film) and falls in love

Another Video hits type clip

Rat runs in front of my feet, now wary and with feet tucked up on my seat and hands clamped firmly over my ears, I start to wonder how long this film is!!

Intermission - with splitting headaches and exhausted we decided to go home and get our ear plugs and come back.

Needless to say we never returned !

Terribly over it in Trichy - a variation on Sleepless in Seattle

Well after our amazing experiences at Tiruvannamalia we decided to move onto Trihcy which we had been told was an interesting town - got there in the pouring rain to find not much at all !!!

In one day managed to cover what we wanted to see which was a pretty much an impressive Rock Fort Temple a tiny building perched high on a mountain looming large over the city and a huge Sari shop which covered many metres and three floors.

The tricky part about Trichy however was leaving - monsoonal rain had us trapped a bridge had collapsed about 20km from the town that was the main access via bus and rail tracks had overturned when they attempted release the flood waters - yes the release point was also where the main railways were built!!! I have lost count of how many engineering schools we had seen, but who am I to judge.

Accepting our fate we decided to get ourselves a posh residence (clean with flushing toilet and hot water) and settle into life in Trichy, we engaged the services of a Hindi teacher and had lessons for four days and now know enough to build on.

However Hindi or not we took our first chance to get the hell out of Trichy and got the train to Kerela......