Rejections don’t bother me. Review of ‘The other end of the corridor’ by Sujata Rajpal
Rejections don’t bother me. Review of ‘The other end of the corridor’ by Sujata Rajpal Man. Woman. Man and woman. Man vs Woman. Relationships. Perceptions of relationships. Marriage. These are issues that were there in the past and are hotly debated even in our times. If I were asked to review ‘The other...
Does Ashay Abbhi go around with severed hands?
Besides the question that the title poses, others could be: ‘Do book reviewers always have murder in their thoughts?’ Or ‘Why do writers get unreadable stuff published?’ Or ‘Is every reader qualified to call a book bad or good?’ Or ‘Is a book that disgusts one reader end up disgusting every other?’ These questions have...
Tabla and Dagga. Review of ‘Stellar Signs’
It isn’t just Jatin, the astro-investigator’s assistant in ‘Stellar Signs’ written by Manjiri Prabhu, who dreams to hit it off like table and dagga, we see examples of twosome awesomeness all around. Readers and writers need to hit it off like table and dagga if you want to get away from the clichéd husband and...
The side effect of an itch. Review of ‘Chronicles of Urban Nomads’
I remember asking my drawing teacher one day after school, ‘Sir, what should I do to improve my drawing skills?’ He answered, ‘Learn to look at everything from multiple perspectives.’ He then asked me to look at the empty classroom from where I was standing and then wanted me to lie down flat on the...
The truth serum: Review of ‘A hundred lives for you’
If you’ve ever played that game of plucking out petals from a flower while saying ‘She loves me’ and ‘She loves me not’, you’ll know what I mean when I say that the first few pages of this book made me say ‘I’ll read it’ and ‘I’ll read it not’… and yet, I read on....
Standing on the parapet dangerously: Review of ‘Life is always aimless…’
Akash was standing on the parapet dangerously, about to end his life, when he finally decides he is in love and now has ‘an intense urge to record his feeling of deep love for Maria and life,’ and decides to live on. Throughout the novel I felt I was on the edge of some parapet...
Crime is always in the real world
What happens when you cross criminal attitude, real temptations, the anonymity of the virtual world, and greed with creative imagination? A thriller is born! One such thriller is ‘God is a Gamer’ written by Ravi Subramanian where the concept of bitcoins, the Misznay Schardin effect, and TOR come together to take a reader off on...
Ranks and egos: Review of ‘Love @ Air Force’
If you think the book is an academic dissection of the Indian Air Force, please do not go near this one because though the book does take you inside the mind of a few uniformed men, it stops much before you could be in a position to even sight a base. As I read on,...
The business of wildlife
Wildlife is getting popular. It is everywhere… pretty girls pronounce ‘tiger’ with a pout in a Page 3 party, the hoi polloi wear camouflage bottoms as they stroll near India Gate looking for tiger masks, everyone who buys a DSLR wants to visit a national park and ‘shoot’ a tiger, publications welcome articles that roar...
This is how we speak. Review of ‘Terms and conditions apply’
I am just wondering what the purists will have to say about this book where the title is in English, the author’s name is written in Hindi… and the 14 short stories inside use English phrases and words almost where any of the urban and rural reader would while communicating in his daily life. This...
Adjectives for Sid
The book’s cover calls Sid a ‘man in progress’ and the cover behind the cover (yes, and that’s something of an innovation for a novel) calls him amiable, easy-going, lovable, beer-lover, idiosyncratic, witty, impulsive, thoughtless, vain, master of denial, idiotic, well-meaning, comical, vice-president, metrosexual, and smart-ass. Even his relationship with his wife in the first...
His life was a series of deceptions. Review of ‘Mothers, lovers and other strangers’
There are many ways this review can be twisted and turned. I can easily say that despite the title of the book, it is an engrossing murder mystery where Inspector Waghle travels far north for the sake of unravelling the truth that was simply trying its best to get erased. But no, the book isn’t...
