_Rudra Veena_ (The Veena of Shiva, which sounds very baritone) is a movie with great intentions. The movie tries to fight the caste system, tries to argue that helping a fellow living being is of much taller order than even the praising the glory of the lord thru music. But I don't totally agree with the means with which these great intentions have been shown. The arguments between Satyam and Ganapathi Sastri bring out good truths, but they get silly at certain points trying to argue that music is in noway a means to the end. The movie also doesn't explain in detail on how the transformation has taken place. Instead, it takes the traditional Indian way of narration showing the results (i.e. transformation, in a few slide show kind of frames) and not the efforts to achieve the results. Chiranjeevi and Gemini Ganesan give a great performances, but Chiranjeevi is not close to a brahmin lad both in terms of accent and body movements. Overall, this is some good movie making with some great intentions and fantastic music by Maestro Ilaiyaraja.
