Factual accuracies in Vaaranam Aiyiram

Its been a long long time since I last posted anything in this blog. So its time for one. Vaaranam Aiyiram is the recent one I saw and I decided I should blog about it. If you already know me, you are thinking I am going to b*tch about it, but you are wrong. I was quite surprised at the accuracies in the story. Let me list them for you:

1) Hero (Surya) gets Heroine1 (Meghna)'s number. Here is the clip:

The number is 510 555 3434. While 555 subcode numbers are often fictional, 510 is really area code that includes Berkeley. Great start for a movie trying to be accurate.

2) Hero says that he lived in University Ave for 40$. The story is assumed to be in 1995s. With US inflation at (http://www.usinflationcalculator.com/), I calculated it to be 59$ ~ 60$. From: http://www.law.berkeley.edu/142.htm, I can at least see bunch of them in 60$ range. Close enough.

3) The story is set in 1995 and you can see while he "roams around the city" that there are cut-outs of Jayalalithaa (the current Tamilnadu CM) here:

Note that when this movie was filmed (2007?), Jayalalithaa wasn't the CM. So, at least they must have morphed, or they must have been super lucky to drive through one of Jaya's birthday cutouts in the city that are usually placed around her birthday - sometime in February.

While all of these can be dismissed as just being accidental, I'm giving a benefit of doubt for this movie.