Remember seeing
Singapore in ‘Priya’ the blockbuster of 1978 starring Rajinikanth, Sridevi and Ambarish. The storyline was that of my favorite writer Sujatha, who was to remark a couple of years
later that he had heard that ‘cinestory’ somewhere !
15th
March is also ‘the Ides of March’ - a day on the Roman calendar that was marked by several religious observances and
became notorious as the date of the assassination of Julius Caesar in 44 BC.
The death of Caesar made the Ides of March a turning point in Roman history.
Although March
(Martius) was the third month of the Julian calendar, in the oldest Roman
calendar it was the first month of the year. On this day, Caesar was stabbed to death at a
meeting of the senate. As many as 60 conspirators, led by Brutus and Cassius, were
involved. According to Plutarch, a seer had warned that harm would come to
Caesar no later than the Ides of March. On his way to the Theatre of Pompey,
where he would be assassinated, Caesar passed the seer and joked, "The
ides of March have come," meaning to say that the prophecy had not been
fulfilled. This meeting is famously dramatised in William Shakespeare's play
Julius Caesar, when Caesar is warned by the soothsayer to "beware the Ides
of March.”
Caesar's death was
a closing event in the crisis of the Roman Republic, and triggered the civil
war that would result in the rise to sole power of his adopted heir Octavian
(later known as Augustus). Caesar’s
killing is not the only event related to 15th March.
In 1889, a cyclone
wrecked six warships—three U.S., three German—in the harbor at Apia, Samoa,
leaving more than 200 sailors dead. In
1941, a deadly blizzard struck the
northern Great Plains, leaving at least 60 people dead in North Dakota and
Minnesota and six more in Manitoba and Saskatchewan. In 1988 NASA reported,
that ozone layer over the Northern
Hemisphere has been depleted three times faster than predicted and in 20013, after
accumulating reports of a mysterious respiratory disease afflicting patients
and healthcare workers in China, Vietnam, Hong Kong, Singapore and Canada, the
World Health Organization issued a heightened global health alert which came to
be known under the acronym SARS (for
Sudden Acute Respiratory Syndrome). [source : www.smithsonianmag.com]
The Ides of March
is a 2011 American political drama film directed by George Clooney from a
screenplay written by Clooney. The film featured as the opening film at the 68th
Venice International Film Festival and at the 27th Haifa International Film
Festival and was shown at the 2011 Toronto International Film Festival. ….and the link to Priya movie – Rajnikant acted
as Julius Caesar in a drama inside the movie but would hastily conclude that important
scene.
With regards – S.
Sampathkumar
15th Mar
2016.
