Mapping the Missing Pages
When this cult comedy, Naduvula Konjam Pakkatha Kanom which roughly translates to a few pages are missing in the middle got released in the year 2012, two things instantly became house holdnames. One was the brilliant actor, Vijay Sethupathi and another one was medulla oblongata whose first line in wiki description reads like “The medulla oblongata (or medulla) is located in the brainstem, anterior and partially inferior to the cerebellum.” When I googled a bit about this movie I got to know that this movie was later remade in Telugu, Kannada and also Malayalam as Pustakamlo konni pagelu missing, Kwatle satisa, Medulla oblongata respectively but none of them weren’t as well received as the original one. Getting reminded of some of my college internal exams in which I used to copy but still manage to fail.
This movie revolves around four friends but there are no songs in which the hero holds his friend’s pinky finger and dances for a song nor he avenges the villain who killed one of his friends nor takes a three hour long lecture on friendship nor marries off his daughter to one of his friend’s son to strengthen their friendship bond nor sacrifices the girl he loves for friendship. This movie doesn’t even have dialogues around friendship except in one or two places but still, this movie will remain my favourite movie on friendship for a long time (yes, I have seen Shawshank and Natpukaaga). If you haven’t seen this movie yet, please try watching before reading this blog. Here it is.
The Plot
Prem is the protagonist of the story. Bucks, Bhaji and Saras are his three friends. Two days before Prem’s wedding they decide to play cricket. The game gets a little serious and Prem in a bid to catch a ball falls down only to get injured in his head. He quickly gets back on his toes as the injury is not serious. But soon after the match, the friends are in for a shock. Due to the injury, Prem develops retrograde amnesia and short-term memory loss, wherein he remembers the chain of events which leads to the injury but forgets the last one year of his life and fails to remember everything after the injury. He remembers his life till college and recognizes his friends, but is clueless about his upcoming wedding and about Dhanalakshmi(his girlfriend) herself, as it is during the last one year that he met her, fell in love with her and decided to marry her. Fearing trouble, his friends take him to a doctor, who says that he could recover anytime. Hence, his friends plan to keep him in their company, enact a drama till he ties the wedding knot, with the hope that he would get back his memory soon, while covering Prem’s disorder from everyone else. In the end, everything works out well, and Prem gets his memory back.
The Memory Game
This movie has a pretty linear storyline in terms of how the story is told. But what intrigued me to write a blog about this movie is how Prem’s memory keeps jumping back to the point where he injured his head several times throughout the movie. So, I did watch the movie again to note down the all the places where Prem starts describing the series of events that lead to his injury or wonders what actually happened (Ennachi!). This is only one side of the tale; the other side is where his friends start reminding other events that happened either sometime during the runtime of the movie or some time ago. I made a note of this too. My idea was to map such points in the runtime of the movie back to the place where the memory leads to.
Design Inspiration
Since cricket plays such an important role in the movie I decided to take some data representation which is used in modern day cricket. After going few charts decided that a wagon wheel kind of plot which maps starting point to the end point with an arc will be the apt one for this movie.
The Data Design
Each blue line represents a memory traceback event. It starts from the present and leads to some time in the past (Read from right to left). The red line represents the movie runtime. The pane above the red line represents Prem’s memory. The pane below represents all attempts by his friends to kindle Prem’s memory and remind him of some event( which he doesn’t remember anymore ). They also try to remind him of some of the lies which they say during the course of the movie to convince him of something, which is represented by dotted blue lines. The decision on the range of timescale was a tricky one as in the movie they do not mention the timeline of when this happened. Hence I decided to split the timeline into three distinct segments. One is the events that are actually part of the movie, other is the timeline of events that happened some time ago like Prem losing his bike ten days ago, and the last one is the events that happened a long time ago like Prem’s first love Saira Bhanu.
There are a lot of events that happen throughout the movie. But many of them are single point events. Only the events whether Prem ‘s brain or his friends attempt to remind him of something which can have a start point and an end point are considered for this plot.
Plotting the Plot
So that’s this beautiful movie on friendship rendered as a data viz. The point above the redline where many lines converge is the point where Prem injures his head and loses his memory. The dotted lines on the pane below the red line are the lies his friends try reminding him so that he will attend his own reception. The green line represents the event where Prem regains his memory and everything between that green line are the missing pages of his life. Figure out the rest of it yourselves.
There are a lot of painful events in our own life which we wish we could not feel or remember just like Prem. No, I don’t mean marriage. The fascinating thing about the movie isn’t the screenplay nor the rib-tickling humour but the fact that this movie was based on a true story.
There are some events in our life that trumps all the fairy tales that we have ever read and those events make all other pain worth bearing.
