The way foods delight our mind, integrates our passion, and brings all kinds of emotions in nostalgic form – is blissful and peaceful too.
The 2020 Indian Kannada-language drama film “Bheemasena Nalamaharaja” can impact our sensibility and merge it with our spiritual bonding with our loved ones. Directed by Karthik Saragur and produced by Pushkara Mallikarjunaiah, Rakshit Shetty, and Hemanth M. Rao, this film is based on six rasas – sweet, sour, salty, bitter, pungent, and astringent. But a true meal needs the essence of love – which is abundantly found in Lathesha’s meal, who is the leading character of this movie.
The movie begins with Sara Mary, who is a caretaker at an old-age home, and was suggested by her supervisor to take a vacation due to her over-exhausting work to a hilly resort, called Nadi Moola. Sara meets Lathesha, the resort cook, and tasted a delicious biriyani served by him. The flavour and savour of the biriyani made Sara nostalgic enough so she wanted to meet Lathesha. That’s how Lathesha introduced him and shared his tragic romantic life story, involving his former guest at the resort, Vedavalli. Growing up in an orphanage, Lathesha always felt the lack of motherly taste of food and dreamt of being a cook. On the other hand, nurtured by a loving mother but a strict father, Vedavalli was forbidden to eat excessive food. Lathesha and Vedavalli had nothing much in common but they were invisibly bound by the thread of food – Vedavalli loves to eat and Lathesha lives to cook and feed, perfect two sides of a coin. Even Veda named him “Bheemasena Nalamaharaja” for his wonderful talent. Through the thread of incidents, Lathesha and Veda faced many happy moments along with tragic incidents. And the storyline twisted nicely by revealing an unexpected truth.
It is not exactly a mouth-watering food movie but provides a complicated message. Food just provides a comforting background to the narration that mainly deals with what seems to be the constant urge of human beings to live in the traumatizing past and make the present insufferably bitter. However, through the taste of foods, the viewers can taste their lives’ different shades of flavour. Life: as it tastes.
