Tushita Reddy

I remember attempting to read Shakespeare when I was 11 years old. I was keen to read the plays and be able to understand them because he was so highly praised in many books, TV shows, and movies that I’ve come across. But as someone so new to reading, that style of writing, the language, and the complex concepts discussed in the plays, I was frustrated at not being able to understand them. On my next birthday, my uncle gifted a series called ‘No Fear Shakespeare’ to me. The left half of the page contained the original text and the right half gave a simple dialogue-to-dialogue translation. It allowed me to understand the plot of the story, but the emotions were conveyed and made clear to me only through watching plays. I streamed bad-quality Broadway plays of Macbeth and saw adaptations like West-Side Story. So, having never seen any version of Othello, I was excited to watch Vishal Bharadwaj’s Omkara.  The first and most obvious difference I noticed between the play and the movie was