Kerala Cafe's home!

Finally, I got the Kerala Cafe DVD yesterday. Every week during my elongated stay back home, I never missed a chance to peek into the local video store. Fresh titles, mostly 6-7-month-old films, were al-ready having their video releases, not Kerala Cafe.

I was hooked by the movie the day I saw that. Malayalam movies are usually late releases in Bangalore. So the first feed on any film would be the online reviews and my movie-buff journalist friend back in Pathanamthitta. All were going gung-ho over the movie. We finally saw it in a multiplex, a month after its release back home.

I wished my non-Malayalee friends could enjoy it, and badly wanted the DVD to have good subtitles. I messaged Shankar Ramakrishnan, one of the 10 directors in the project, enquiring about the subtitles. He said the festival version of the movie was subtitled and asked if it’s good. I hadn’t seen it, but I assured him I would at the very first chance.

A month passed, I was in Kerala. My cousins and relatives who missed the film were keenly awaiting the video release. My regular visits to the video stores didn’t yield any result. After 50 days, I came back to Bangalore, into the routine of bylines and deadlines. Before starting the shift that Saturday, I took a walk to a video store in Brigade Road. I was just browsing through the Malayalam titles as always, and there it was: both in DVD and VCD!

Back home by 1am, I hit the buttons of our DVD player. Sleep could wait. Sadly, the subtitles inserted by the DVD-makers were a bit disappointing. Maybe because of the beautiful impression cast by the movie on me, but I seriously think even I would have done a better job.

However, even the average subtitles couldn’t let me stop enjoying the movie. A good work. I love it.