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Mar 15, 2010

Romance fails to capture my heart most of the time, it sinks like Titanic down the abyss of my logical brain, except some edgy SF romance like Happy Accidents. Ditto is not Happy Accidents, but it is different from the usual run-of-the-mill romances. The added charm is, it takes place in Korea in 1979 and 2000 and stars two HAM radios.

Ditto has HAM radio as the instrument of connection and happens in a college campus in Korea. HAM radios - that niche elitist technology(at least for us growing up in the third world in the eighties) when cell phones(or satellite phones) were more than a decade into the future, was something  I had yearned for, but I knew I would never get. Rajiv Gandhi, our erstwhile PM was a ham, the guy with impeccable English who did countdown for ISRO's rocket launches was a HAM - these were the kind of people who becamse HAMS, not scrawny little girls.

In addition to 'HAM'ming, the historical events that played out in Korea, the issues that concern the national psyche are also subtly portrayed in the film. One part of the film happens in Oct, 1979 an eventful month in South Korean history and other is set in 2000 - a time of modernism and relative stability.  Also to be noted is the stark contrast of Asian cultures with Western materialistic culture, which has also intruded into Korea of the present.

I liked the movie immensely, I am a sucker for time travel, chatting across time, conducting exchanges with parallel universes all that kind of will-never-happen phenomena. This movie gives me a peek into it, worth spending my time.

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