Cinema, Karam, Kapi

I have been a self confessed fan of Director Shankar for many years now. My first tryst with his direction dates back to Gentleman when I was still in school and had limited understanding of the art that is cinema. But he was one of those Directors, I thought then, who has a bright future since he had tread on a sensitive subject in that film with elan. I have enjoyed all of his movies thereafter. In each outing of his, he brought out a different panorama of film making - something that the commercial directors have always refrained from. His heroes were larger than life, be it the "One day CM" in Mudalvan or the "Bribery conscious old man" in Indian. Ofcourse, and naturally my most liked movies of his are Sivaji and Enthiran, which feature my personal matinee idol, the Superstar of Indian Cinema, Rajinikanth. After watching Sivaji, I felt that for a change, Shankar has made a film for someone else - for Rajini fans in this case. After a successful run, his...

Madras I There are two things that are making the news these days in the city, probably three. Madras, as the city has been known historically (and I choose to spell the city's name that way most often) is also the name of a recently released movie. Featuring Karthi, btoher of veteran actor Suriya, Karthi has been quite experimental with Tamil Cinema ever since his first release 5 years ago with Paruthi Veeran. He has played a village lad, unemployed Chennai youth, and many a time a happy go lucky guy. His box office records have been topsy turvy, where he has the most returns when least expected. Back to Madras, the film is shot in North Madras, which has been largely neglected in Kollywood for a long time. Except for a one-off gana song or a kuthu song, nothing has captured the imagination of this part of the city, which was also the original settlement along the sea shore. I have had the privilege of travelling to North Madras twice or more every week to work where my prev...

Came across this interesting note about the origin of Filter Kapi - by Mr. Elangkumaran Jayabharathi and wanted to share with our readers...  T here are multiple speculations as to why its called "degree" coffee: The most plausible explanation is that it's not "degree" coffee. It's Chicory  which came to be pronounced as  tikeri  and eventually became degree . Chicory helps extract more flavour from the coffee beans. Milk certified as pure with was called  degree milk  owing to a mistaken association with the thermometer. It is claimed that coffee prepared with degree milk  became known as  degree coffee. The first  decoction  is sometimes called the  first degree, thus leading to the  name  degree coffee South Indian coffee (a.k.a  filter coffee ) is a milk coffee (perfect example of South Indians' affinity for dairy products). Most of the beans are grown in India (Arabica and Robusta varieties...