Elgin Talkies has been in Bangalore as long as anyone can remember. It was around long before television antennas completely replaced church domes and temple spires as the dominant feature of the city's urban skyline. The cinema was part of the  and it was of the city before video clubs, satellite dishes, and multi-screen cineplexes at the neighbourhood mall. This cinema was here 113 years ago, opening right after the Lumière brothers unveiled to an amazed Bombay crowd the wonders of motion pictures. Munna has worked at Elgin Talkies for over 30 years. He started out as the projector's assistant as a boy and, Cinema Paradiso style, slowly worked his way up to supervisor. Even as a boy, Munna was a movie fanatic, his tastes tending to run to Shashi Kapoor and Dara Singh epics.

"I went to the movies every day, sometimes twice a day, seven days a week,'' he recalls. ''On Sundays, it was enough to join up with an adult who would pretend to be your parent. As a child, you could get in free. So I waited in front of the theatre for older men in their 50's to arrive, and I would go up to them and ask if they would take me in with them. I would get in without paying, and once inside we would split up.'' Till one day the projectionist caught him. And gave him the job of his life.

The crowd lines up exchanging their 20 rupees for three hours of entertainment. The theatre's blue interior is riddled in mildew and age, and the roof has given away in parts to a view of the rafters.

In the large but cramped confines of Elgin Talkies, movies are watched in the company of at least 100 odd men. That offers a parallel, free show. Huddling around the cinema screen, the audience makes itself seen and heard at every turn of the plot - whistling at the wet saree number, egging on the Bobby Deol as he takes on ten baddies, applauding, repeating melodramatic dialogues about lost values and dancing and singing to the songs.

Then, once it becomes clear that the plot is moving towards a happy ending, the audience doesn't even bother to wait for the final scene and starts making its way out. Soon after, the last of the film reel sputters to an end, spilling out one last bit of light on the screen in the words 'THE END'. Then the mammoth American 1930s projector, fittingly named the 'Strong Mogul', hums and blanks, leaving the hall in darkness. The crowd slowly trudges out while another one settles itself inside, in an endless, beautiful routine. 

The movie, the cinema hall, the company: what more can you ask, to a 20 rupees ticket?