A brief WhatsApp exchange among Sri Indira Parthasarathy, Sri Amaruvi Devanathan, and the author becomes an imagined parlour conversation on Donna Tartt’s provocative claim that novels take us inside another soul while films leave us as voyeurs.
From Satyajit Ray’s Apu trilogy to Bhishma’s death in the Mahabharata and the sorrows of Ramanujacharya, the discussion asks what novels and cinema do differently to imagination, memory, and feeling.