In praise of vintage

12

Old buildings talk, and give our cities character. Why are we razing them? Old buildings fascinate me. The older the better. Whenever I go to a new place, I first try to look up its old buildings. I spent the best years of my youth gazing at old structures. I used to spend my free time in Bangalore roaming around the Cantonment area looking for old buildings. The sight of an old structure fills me with joy and excitement. Old buildings haunt me even in my dreams. I was fascinated by Elgin Talkies in Shivajinagar. Unlike other colonial buildings, this is not an imposing structure. It is a small, single-storey building at a busy, working class intersection. It was built the same year Lumiere brothers invented the cinema! I used to walk down from Express Building on Queen's Road to Shivajinagar just....

Omkara: A Midsummer Nightmare

122

Had Shakespeare been alive today, he would definitely have filed a criminal defamation suit against the entire team of Omkara. Much hyped Omkara is so disgusting. Disgusting is an understatement. It is a daylight murder of one of the greatest classics in English literature. Starting from the so called 'superb' actors to production, scriptwriting to direction, Omkara is a disaster. Shakespeare' s characters are multi dimensional and complex in nature. They are basically created for the theatre. It will be a tough challenge to bring them alive on screen even for the finest directors in the World. Anybody can guess, what will happen to such characters of Shakespeare in the hands of Hindi film makers, who are experts in making loud, pompous and unrealistic movies. Othello, like a majority of Shakespearean plays, tells us about the shallowness of human life. It is full of....