N. Raghuraman's column: Why teach children to read before watching?

Usually, when the younger generation of the family asks me for my opinion about a film on OTT channels, I advise them to read the book first and watch the movie later. The last such advice I gave was about Netflix's 2025 release 'The Woman in Cabin 10', which is based on Ruth Ware's psychological thriller novel of the same name in 2016. Earlier, similar films were made on the novel 'The Thursday Murder Club' by Richard Osman and 'The Housemaid' was based on the book by Frida McFadden. A youngster on the family WhatsApp group silenced me by writing that '... But the book will spoil the fun of the film and don't ask Raghu uncle, he is very old-fashioned. I grew up in an environment with strict rules where it was the norm to have strict control over oneself before finding happiness. So during my college days, I was asked to read R.K. Narayan's 'The Guide' before watching Dev Anand's 'Guide'. However, by the time I was graduating, the film was ten years old. Released in 1965, the film went on to become one of the longest-remembered classics of Hindi cinema. It was then that I saw the difference between the book and the film. The beauty of Narayan's words is inextricably linked to Malgudi – a quiet, dusty, slow-paced South Indian town, on the rise of modernity. He narrates the railway station, the local humour of the town barber and the slow-paced everyday life with rich social reality. In keeping with the grandeur of the big screen of 1960s cinema, the film was shot in vibrant and colourful locations of Rajasthan. The cityscapes in the film and Raju's tour-guide sequences were shot around the City Palace, Pichola Lake, Fateh Sagar Lake, Suraj Pol and Hathi Pol in Udaipur. These places were beautiful to look at, but these changes took away the special intimacy of the small town that makes Narayan's world authentic. The socio-political changes taking place in the South Indian town of the 1950s were replaced by a more normal cinematic rural India. The beauty of Narayan's writing lies in its light satire, restrained realism and deep understanding of human frailties. In his book, he did not create extraordinary heroes. He wrote about ordinary people who are caught in the strange games of their own small-thinking, greed and fate. While this cinematic masterpiece was appreciated for its brilliant acting, timeless music and impeccable storytelling, the film is based on a completely different kind of aesthetic philosophy. It replaces Narayan's quiet, psychological nuances with the over-theatrical and high-stakes morality required of commercial Indian cinema. After reading the book first and then watching the film, I appreciated my father's decision to maintain the purity of words within me. Later in life, wherever possible, I read the book first and then watched the film. The last time this happened was with the 2023 film 'The Zone of Interest'. I read Martin Amis's book of the same title in 2014. Before watching Quentin Tarantino's 1997 film 'Jackie Brown', I had also read Elmore Leonard's 1992 crime thriller 'Rum Punch'. This process made me mature from within. I understood that when something goes from book to film, it can never be an exact adaptation of it. Instead, it becomes a campfire-like occasion between friends, where the story progresses and changes according to each storyteller. Perhaps this is why even today I prefer to read the book first. The book tells the story in the author's voice, while in the film you get someone else's interpretation of it. The fun is not diminished by reading first, but you are able to see what has changed, what has been left and sometimes what has been lost. The trick is to read the book before watching the film. Not to decide which one is better, but to know how the same story can lead to two different lives.