MellowDrama

This is a (hopefully uninhabited) rant nee review about a very shitty piece of cinema (that has apparently done hell of a business) called Saaho. I was circumstantially forced to watch this movie and since then I have been actively cursing the makers, actors and sellers of this movie as well as my own circumstances and lack of imagination at what I could have done /achieved differently. YOU can choose to read whichever of the subhead appeals to you the most. MY Circumstances: The movie I think came up into focus when a trailer was played during Bahubali 2. No prize for guessing they wanted to bank upon Prabhas' popularity as the very fine Bahubali, no? Well, i partly agreed to go see this movie for the same reason and also because I was in Varanasi and we had time in hand before our flight you know the rest, have been cursing the makers, actors and sellers of this movie as well as my own circumstances. . LADKE in the film: Prabhas acts throughout the movie as if he i...

An engaging novel which hardly sags or ebbs. Beautiful, lyrical and warm, it makes for a perfect weekend read.  ******************************************************************** (I met Sreemoyee Piu Kundu recently at a Women Writer's Fest organised by SheThePeople  at the Saturday Club, Kolkata. I asked her what would she recommend out of her three published works. She asked me what genre do I like and then went to to recommend this as well as Sita's Curse, an erotica. After she left for the podium for her talk, I bought Faraway Music.) Sreemoyee Piu Kundu, an ex journalist, debuted with Faraway Music in 2013. Partly biographical, Faraway Music is the story of acclaimed writer Piya Choudhury. It meanders through the bylanes of Kolkata, soaks in the rains of Mumbai, rubs shoulders with the Dilli ki Sardi and races towards end via a posh NY penthouse before finally coming home to Kolkata. Piya tells her story to another journalist on a long flight and this play ...

A book that will tug at your heart because of the subject that forms its crux and the way with which it has been dealt with. A light read that is not hollow and the writing which is Oh-so-perfect! ********************************************************** 'It Ends With Us' is a beautiful love story between a man and a woman and also between a mother and her child. The story takes place in Boston and the city plays an integral part in the novel.  Maine girl, Lucy Bloom, has a passion for gardening and hates her wife beater of a father. She meets a hunk on the day her father is buried and she has almost run away from his funeral after delivering a disastrous eulogy. He has all the qualities of an Mills and Boons hero plus Ryle Kincaid is a neurosurgeon. But it is the two different things that they both want which squish the chance of them being together. So after the first very dazzling meeting on a rooftop, they both meet each other after some six months when Lucy ha...

A book that will leave your palms sweaty, fill you with fear and rage but which will then, also soothe you down and offer some answers via the word of the warrior Guru, on whose life and legend this is based upon. Review A nine year old boy is brought the severed head of his father. Guru Gobind Rai ascended the throne after his father Guru Tegh Bahadur was beheaded on the orders of the Mughal king Aurangzeb. The tenth Sikh Guru transformed the land of Punjab and through his touch the common men of the villages of modern day Northern plains became lions, Singhs.   The book, The Sacred Sword , follows the life and legend of Guru Gobind Singh. This fictional account of Guru’s life takes us from Chandni Chowk in Delhi, where the beheading of his father took place, to Nanded, where the warrior Guru breathed his last. In between we witness how he transforms into a great leader training his people for a war that was thrust on him, a gallant fighter who was an ace marks...

Ah! what a lovely book it is. A Dog's Purpose is the story of a dog who keeps taking birth again and again and is unable to understand that even after being around a boy through his growing up years and after being a police dog who helped find and save lives, why is he born over and over again. What could be the purpose of his existence? While he grapples with the question, the dog, over a few lives learns various skills which help him actually realise his purpose. He goes through a range of emotions, meets nice people, is born in the home of an indifferent  Colnoel and bumps into some not-so-nice people. The book is written in first person and that makes it an all the more interesting read. His life isn't monotonous at all, especially as the police dog and the author communicates all this very well via the dog. He can do all the things that dogs are known to do but if you are not much of a dog person then this is an eye opener into how much the dogs as animals can perceiv...

The book had been borrowed after I finished reading The Krishna Key. Something or the other kept coming up and I could not settle down with the book. But then I decided to take my life in my own hands and managed to wade through this massive book (441 pages plus some more, bibliography etc).  Now you might wonder why am I using this particular verb- wade. If you are anything like me and have a thing for pace or a mother of two with limited access to 'me time' which you spend on reading rather than getting your eyebrows shaped then that is what I suggest you do, if the book is on your to-read list. The book has interesting portions and some information that any history lover would love but other than the author makes you work hard for the money you have spent on it. The story follows two tracks; one in present day India, where a girl child Chandini, from a Kanpur slum is polished to become the PM of the country, by her mentor who had found (dug out literally) an inscription wit...

This is the first book in the Vish Puri series and I unfortunately read it after I had read The Case of the Love Commandos. Had I read it before I would have been even more favourably inclined towards the author. To cut a long story short, this is a much more lovable book then the previous one and something gives me a feeling that all the other ones after this, as wel.. So without much ado, here is what I thought of the plot, characters and the writing in the book, "The Case of the Missing Servant". A servant goes amiss and the employer- an upright lawyer in Rajasthan- is charged with her murder. When our hero, 'the' Vish Puri of Most Private Investigators starts on the job, he has nothing to go on with. The lawyer's wife and others in the household can't help him beyond the missing servant's name. They did not know where she came from and of course where had she mysteriously disappeared to. The only thing he finds in the servant quarter that she occu...

Umm.....The book makes for a light reading. If you are an Indian reading this book, chances are you will be supremely impressed by Mr. Hall's knowledge (or research) on Indian towns and how things work here. I may add here that he is a British journalist living now in India with his wife. That said, I found the book enjoyable to a great extent but also found some bits and parts quite irritating.  The most enjoyable things first. The caste of characters and their names. Consider these- Facecream, Flush and Tubelight. The plot is thick and quite absorbing. You do want to find out what is going on with the characters and do want to get to the bottom of things. The plot takes you from Khan Market in New Delhi to a pilgrimage to Vaishno Devi to the villages of UP. The author is very particular about the details of the gulleys and the lanes that he mentions in the story and I felt as if he might have visited each one of them standing there thinking about how to further the pl...

I have been on sort of a reading spree. In the past one month alone I have managed to finish reading the Grey series, The Time Keeper, A Thousand Splendid Suns, After the Darkness, as well as a Mary Higgins Clark suspense thriller All Through The Night (Though I neither found it suspenseful nor thrilling.) I had started Our Lady Of Alice Bhatti (OLoAB) before all of these. I read about ten pages and thought it to be one of those books that I would not be able to read or even skim. After putting it down for a month I picked it up to lend it to someone who wants to read it and I thought I might as well take out my bookmark. As I was taking out the bookmark I read the page it was placed on and for a strange reason I was hooked to the book. This re-affirms my faith in the fact that it is neither too late nor too early, everything happens in its own right time- a point that echoes in Mitch Albom's The Time Keeper (I loved the book and found what creative writing is about, but that...

I feel strongly about a line from Thomas Gray’s Ode on a Distant Prospect of Eton College. The poet writes ‘where Ignorance is bliss, ‘tis folly to be wise’. In an idyllic setting I would associate this entire line with basking under the sun on a small hill top watching clouds float and sheep graze at a distance though in day to day life I often quote the half of it- ‘ignorance is bliss’. And I thought of this line very often while reading Moni Mohsin’s The Diary of a Social Butterfly (TDSB). Butterfly is a socialite and is blissfully ignorant about her own inanities. Moni Mohsin is a journalist who wrote a column by the same name in Pakistan’s Friday Times. This book is a selection of these very column entries. The 220 page book at Rs 199 is fully paisa vasool. The diary is set up in modern day Pakistan. It though records the social hits and misses of Butterfly, is a commentary, actually a satirical commentary, on the state of affairs in large. Butterfly has no clue about...

In t h e year 1990 I was probably running down the tea gardens outside my house in gay abandon. In the year 1990 a 14 year old boy and his community were forced in to an exile which they have still not managed to come out of. ‘Our Moon Has Blood Clots, The Exodus of the Kashmiri Pandits’ is a memoir written by Rahul Pandita, a Kashmiri Pandit and a journalist. The 256 pages of the book and the timeline at the end of the book tell a tale that many of us are familiar with but vaguely. In ‘us’ I refer to people who have known that Kashmir has faced problem (s), thanks to TV and the newspapers and that a certain Pandit community faced exodus years ago.   The memoirs are moving and it is not just in the way they have been written. The stories of brutality, atrocities on men, women and children, episodes and incidents that have been narrated are gut wrenching and heart pulling. There is kindness also but largely there is blood and hunger and loss. This sense of loss th...

Watched Wanted on DVD this weekend. Produced by Boney Kapoor, directed by PrabhuDeva and starring Salman Khan and just that. anyone else on the screen did not matter. they were just there to get beaten to pulp, get their head banged on railing/poles/walls/tables/anything in sight. it is an out and out an action flick. The movie is a remake of a Telugu film Pokir, which was also made in Tamil and was directed by Prabhu Deva. The movie is a treat for salman khan fans for the obvious reasons that this gets him doing what he is best at i.e. action and dance but this review is about the fact that wanted is such a treat for those who can tolerate some blood and nasty action (goons being thrown off the train)because of the screenplay, quick dialogues and the exact amount of attitude that Salman Khan as Radhe- an undercover cop- needs to show off. he also plays deadpan lover delivering clever lines penned by Shiraz Ahmed. it has the feel of those 90's movies that made you want to stand up ...