Where it all began

Ooty in July

After a busy month on board the scripting team of a new film 'AAZHAM', I am back punching keys and hiking up memory ridges.  It was late in the afternoon, the second Sunday of July 1977 and in Ooty that meant only one thing...rain,rain and more rain. Forbidden to play outdoors in the slush and puddles, my two younger brothers and I were raising quiet a twister in the house preventing our elder sister from concentrating on her monthly tests.Mom had already developed a migraine and Dad tried Caroms, but my one  year old youngest brother,  wanted to sit on the middle of the board and play. Suddenly dad had a brainwave!.

The century old Assembly Rooms Theater, Ooty

He pulled me and my younger brother aside, announced that he was going to take us to an 'English Movie' and ordered us  to clean up and get dressed.  My eyes widened and the excitement was overwhelming as we had never watched one before.  At around 5:30pm  my brother and I wrapped in raincoats, complete with rain caps, mufflers and gum boots trudged along on both sides of my dad for the one and a half kilometer trek up a hill and down another to the cinema hall which played only English films.  As the constant drizzle and gusty winds combined to create an eerie howling noise we reached downhill and the Assembly Rooms Theater came into view and that image has stayed fresh in my mind gallery.

I watched my first English language film that day and it was the western spoof 'My Name is Nobody' starring Terence Hill and Henry Fonda.  My fragmented memory of the experience includes a long train sequence, a large  bowl of baked beans the blue eyed Terence Hill devoured that  brought a pang of hunger to my stomach, a few gunshots, thundering hooves of horses and a vegetable puff my dad got me during the interval that somehow tasted like baked beans.

The Entrance of Assembly Rooms Theatre

 I became the shrine's most loyal devotee and the next twenty five years, piously watched every movie

screened, changing twice a week, unless severe illness or travel intervened.  I moved out of Ooty to Chennai in 2000 and my most emotional farewell was to this holy place with red seats and a white screen, that served as my private sanctuary where  I could lose myself to merge and become part of  the magic of films, much like a Yogi's  penance in the deep forests. This was the class room chosen by Orson Welles, Stanley Kubrick, Alfred Hitchcock, Woody Allen, James Cameroon and Steven Spielberg among many others, to give me private tutoring.  I have a recurring dream often and in it my own film is  being screened there to a full house and I myself watch from my  favorite C-4 seat and  I wake up to a sense of steely  resolve to make that dream come true as an offering to the shrine where it all began