tholainthupoonavargal : krishna.
This weekend I read tholainthupoonavargal – a novel by Sa. Kanthaswamy (incidentally his son was my (and Sreekanth’s) school mate). This book is about four (Damodharan, Shankaran, Ramaswamy and Venugopal) friends who grow up in a village together and then get separated. One of them (Damodharan) tries to get them all together with the hope of recapturing the magic of their younger days, but the other three are all struggling in life and are not very keen at the idea of this get together some reason or the other.
This story was made as a tele serial a few years ago and proved to be quite popular then (I was told then, that the makers of the serial found the sponsors not very excited about the negativity in the title and wanted to change it!).
I had expected a lot from the book (I have not seen the tele serial) and honestly a bit let down, esp. with the ending, where Damodharan fails to get all his friends together. The entire story (except for Damodaran) depicts all other characters as utter failures in life, which again is a let down, I firmly believe that stories should have a positive thread running along, even if the end is sad – Marocharithra as a movie and Marquez’s “Love and Other Demons” as a book, comes to mind…Some sequences are also not tied together, intentionally maybe, but still for a layman reader like me, there were some things that were up in the air. But the switch between the present and the flashbacks and back were flawless and the friendship between he boys, beautifully told, which makes you wonder why they have been torn apart like this. Maybe in this current age of email, mobile and not to mention Orkut, we may not be able to appreciate the drift that the friends (who were so close) have experienced. Net net, it was a good read for a quite weekend.