I read in 'Katradhum Petradhum' that Maniratnam had a script ready for filming Ponniyin Selvan and asked Sujatha to get the dialogues ready. But down the line they called the whole thing off. Though the reason is reasonable, its not fair that they dropped the project. Maniratnam's thoughts on dropping the project goes something like this - people from three decades have been reading the novel and each will have their own idea of how Nandhini, Ponniyin Selvan and Vandhiyadevan would look; so even with the best cast, he would not be able to satisfy the public; and public opinion would be 'novella irukka madhiri padam illa'. Fair enough. But we don't have even one movie made on the novel. We know Maniratnam will not give us crap to look at, he could have at least given us a chance to know what he thought about the novel and who he thought as the best cast for the characters. It would have been very interesting to see the movie from his point.

There was this program on Stonehenge on Monday and Tuesday coinciding with the summer soltice. It talked about all the facts that people know about Stonehenge, which are very less in number when compared to the stuffs that experts don't know about, and tried to recreate the rituals that would have taken place 4000 years ago during summer soltice. The programme's main focus was on creating a replica of the Stonehenge but questions from viewers were also answered. The second part of the two part programme was the fun part. Taking reference from the bodies that were preserved in Denmark as pointers, the team of experts designed clothes and with cross reference from other cultures a mock ritual was staged in the new Stonehenge. Before that happened, at sunrise Druids came to the new site and cleansed and did rituals to protect the stones. Nobody knew what, why, how, who performed the rituals. The whole exercise was a very good one. Saved me a trip to Salisbury.