In which I saw a devotional movie

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It was a holiday with no prior plans. It started off quite harmlessly with me getting up only by 9 and then making myself so busy that the family couldn’t catch up with me to complain. The power of visual aggressiveness is huge…really *smiles*

By 10 T finally cornered me while I was pretending to be busy folding clothes and gave out a terrific idea. He wanted to make it a Parents’ day out. With us chaperoning them ofcourse *winks*. And so he went out on an errand to secure six movie tickets for the grand plan. He searched high (PVR Cinemas) and he searched low (Pallavi theater) and finally managed to find a guy in the latter who was willing to earn a few rupees more for doing a neat job of procuring tickets for us in absentia. Pallavi theater is one of the old world movie theaters where only one ticket is issued against one person.

We promptly reached the theater before the show began, collected our tickets and readied ourselves to watch the movie “Sri Ramadasu”. I readied myself to get bored. I have this thing about seeing movies which are about mythology or historical stories (kings and princes in skirts kinda movies) etc. My mind block tells me they are “uncool”. As I sat squirming in my seat for the first ten minutes refusing to accept that the movie was anything but boring T leaned over and whispered “Relax, just try and get to that mind set and watch, you will have fun”.

One thing that both of us observed was that mythological and devotional movies are best made in Telugu. It must partly be because of the lyrical quality of the language. Even a scolding sounds funny , for examples “gadadi” (donkey) or “donga na koduka” (thief) in Telugu sounds much better than say “nimmajji” (your grandmother) or “loafer nanna magane” (quite self explanatory) in Kannada. This is purely my opinion.

It’s basically the legend of Bhadrachalam -Lord Rama’s Temple in Andhra Pradesh. How it got built and who built it and why.

As the story evolved I got so involved in it that I did not notice the passage of time. At the end of the movie, I had the craving to go the Temple and experience the whole story again. Such is the power of a story well told or a movie well made.

This movie has become a box office golden goose across Andhra and Karnataka. I would recommend it to everyone. It not only brings forth a legendary tale but also unleashes in front of you the devotion and the madness of a people who no longer exist among us. When I can become a devotional movie watcher so can you!