The Golden House by Salman Rushdie
Think of Salman Rushdie’s The Golden House as a travelling theatre and a mobile culture library, situated primarily in the Macdougal-Sullivan Gardens Historic District or simply the Gardens, and making interim stops at the rest of New York and Bombay. Or Think of the narrative as a collective dream coming crashing down, a dream the […]
On J.K. Rowling
I was vacationing with two of my brothers last week, corporate bigwigs who sashay down the airports every month, eat meals at the lounge and keep their cars parked at the airport every weekend. During dinner, we got talking about lifestyle, and how it was not so difficult to subvert money and find a way. […]
On Harry Potter
Yet another July 31 is here and my social media is filled, cheerfully, in reverence to the boy who lived, to the queen of the magical world; bringing back to a generation of kids who waited for their Hogwarts letters (I, curiously, never did), who tediously and religiously decoded every hidden meaning behind the world […]
On The Road by Jack Kerouac
Some books are known more by their quotes, snippets of awesome that become bigger than the author and the source and find their immortality in Facebook posts, WhatsApp statuses and wallpapers on the screens of the many digital devices we use. Jack Kerouac’s cult classic falls squarely under this category. It is a bustling, energy-filled […]
The Ministry of Utmost Happiness by Arundhati Roy
There is something, not quite serendipity, about reading a book of contemporary relevance, with jingoistic headlines spamming my background, the noise of hyper news anchors rising above the din of the traffic and the crescendo of the city rains. Kashmir in The Ministry of Utmost Happiness, Kashmir on the TV. Jantar Mantar is everywhere. At […]
The Royal Game and Other Stories by Stefan Zweig
Sometime last year, I started painting again. Seeing my art teacher in his element, oblivious to all distractions, I wrote a short story about the lengths an artist goes to perfect his craft. This expanded into a chapbook about the extremes of artistic expression. That project, as projects are wont to do, is gathering dust. […]
The Princes by Manohar Malgonkar
Let one thing be known; most contemporary Indian fiction (in English) is a waste of paper. It is written in ‘simple’ English, as if literature is nothing but a textbook that everyone has to understand, that everyone must follow without any effort, to be a part of the ‘I read’ rat race. It does not […]
The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy
If you haven’t read The God of Small Things yet, you may still have heard all about how the novel grabbed the 1997 Booker, while notoriously creating trouble in Kerala thanks to its sexual explicitness. But there is so much more than Roy’s debut novel achieves. The beauty of Roy’s creation is that it stays […]
Charlie and the Chocolate Factory by Roald Dahl
Imagine rich, creamy dark chocolate, with bits of walnut and a hint of mint, layered with caramel, whipped till ultra-smooth consistency is achieved and moulded to the quirkiest of shapes. Each piece is made to look even more delectable with a dash of exotic colour and a pinch of glitter. The moment you place it […]
Guardian Angel by Julie Garwood
The life of a full-time romance reader is hardly simple. Once you have read as many novels as I have (or, frankly, even a couple dozen fewer), things seriously start to take a turn for the predictable. Nothing shocks you or surprises you and if it does, you clutch your heart harder than the book […]
