Category: Books

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Baramulla Bomber

Baramulla Bomber
Author: Clark Prasad
Publisher: Niyogi Books
Number of Pages: 315
Price: Rs 395
When I first read about Baramulla Bomber
I was intrigued. One, because I’ve read some great trilogies over the recent
years (this too is Eka, part I of a
Trilogy) and two, because the concept of the book sounded very interesting.
It is an ambitious novel to say the
least, spread across multiple countries – Sweden, Norway, the USA and closer
home Pakistan, China and India.
It is peppered with characters as
diverse as ever – a Kashmiri cricket player, a Swedish intelligence agent, a
Pakistani scientist, an Indian Defence Minister and many many more.
It has international relations, politics,
border skirmishes, religion and even some cricket thrown in for good measure. 

What more could one ask for?

The plot:
A blast is heard in Kashmir’s Shaksgam
valley that flattens out an entire area.
A dying Swedish agent leaves a coded message
before he succumbs to mysterious injuries.
A mountaineering team disappears without
a trace.

Indian agencies suspect a secret weapon was
tested in the valley. Pakistani sources insist it was a mining accident while
others say it was an earthquake.
If it was a weapon what kind was it? If Pakistan is readying
to use it how can it be stopped? Was it the same that killed the Swedish spy? Those
are the questions that are bothering India’s Defence Minister Agastya Rathore.
But Pakistan is not his only worry, China is readying for an offensive at India’s
borders too.
And amongst all this is Mansur – a simple Kashmiri man who
dreams of being a part of the National Cricket team without ever really
believing it possible.
The review:
The novel is pacey and you do find yourself turning the pages
eagerly enough. And here’s a warning – This is not a book you can read with the kids running around or the TV blaring. So if you really want to enjoy it look out for a quiet corner.

My problem with the book is it’s climax. The buildup is exciting but the climax is a bit of a letdown.
Perhaps due to the nature of the weapon, it doesn’t leave as huge an impact as promised
by the beginning. I found myself saying “Is that it?”

Also, although there are a number of characters, the books loses
out for lack of a single, charismatic all impacting hero and on the other side there
is no single truly malicious, malevolent villain.  That’s purely a personal view –  that’s how I like a book to be.. specially a thriller.

Then there are some unanswered question?

What were those UFOs?
What’s the story of Agastya’s wife?
Are the members of the mountaineering team dead or alive?
When the guardians meet – if the meeting was such a huge
secret – how come an outsider was near the site?
Of course there are Part 2 and 3 in the offing. I’m hoping I’ll
get my answers then.

This review is part of Blogadda’s Book Review Programme.
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Battle for Bittora by Anuja Chauhan

Battle For Bittora traces the journey of 25 year old ‘kitaanu’ animator Jinni aka Sarojini Pande. From her peaceful office existence Jinni is transported to the dusty mofussil town of Bittora by her very bossy ex MP grandmother, to contest elections. What’s worse, her main opponent is the handsome ex-royal Zain Altaf Khan.. a childhood buddy/crush/sweetheart. The stage is set for some amazing electoral action with a bit of romance thrown in.

Anuja Chahan borrows her characters heavily from the current Indian political milieu which makes it an even better read. Her parties are called Pragati (which has a dynasty leading it) and IJP (with its Hindutva agenda), the state is Pavit Pradesh and there’s even a filmstar Salmon Khan who drops in for campaigning! Her hilariously stereotypical characters and the quaint brand of English had me laughing out loud at places.

The book offers a closeup view of life in a North Indian town and Chauhan does it like she’d lived there not merely researched for the book. Laced with wit and enough twists and turns the book is a great read.

It might not be a second Zoya Factor but it does hold it’s own. Wonder why someone doesn’t take it up and make a film instead of rehashing painful ones like Himmatwala?

Red Chillies has bought the rights to Zoya Factor. Wish they’d hurry up and make the film. In the meanwhile Flipkart delivered Anuja’s third book today – Those Pricey Thakur Girls. Looking forward to it.        

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Men on My Mind – Book Review

Men on my Mind

By Radha Thomas
Price: 195/-
 
I love
debut novels. They’re special. They have to be. After all they’ve remained in
the author’s mind long enough and persistently enough to egg her/him to get
down to writing them, right? Of course there have been times when I’ve got stuck
with really bad apples – incorrect English, the hugest turn off, or amateur
writing.. but the risk is worth taking.
 

That was
what made me want to read this one and I’m glad I did.
 

‘Men on my
Mind’ is nothing if not true to its name. The book traces the adventures of an
Indian girl who grows up with… well …. men on her mind since the tender age of 7. From
a dreamy pre-teen inspired by M&Bs struggling with her first crush, she grows
into a self assured woman gamely trying out all kinds of men for size. She makes her way
from Mumbai to Panchagani, Delhi and New York with bits of New Zealand, Fiji
and China thrown in for good measure. On she soldiers, always with a BFF by her
side for where’s the fun if you don’t have a girl friend to share stories of your sexapades
with?
 

She juggles more than one relationship at a time and takes on one night
stands without a scruple. As she says.. ‘What’s the bloody problem anyway?
Conscience-shmonscience.’ There really are plenty of men around and ‘I’ve never been
able to turn down handsome and rich men’, is her candid confession.
 

However, ‘The
One’ remains elusive. The perfect hunk has a squeaky voice, the perfect boyfreind’s
a pathetic kisser, the urbane older man turns out to be a lech, the dapper
gentleman has a pigsty of a home, the sexy biker’s an anger maniac, the soulful
pianist ends up two-timing her,… sigh! Students,
lawyers, violin players, prospective Nobel laureates,
photographers, restaurateurs, bar tenders, she tries them all only to
discover that it really isn’t easy to find the man of her dreams.

The book is
a hilarious take on men and relationships. Here’s a heroine who turns the
male-female stereotype on its head. She treats her encounters with men with the flamboyance and casualness generally attributed to men in their dealings with
women. Oh she wants true love but she’s fine occupying herself while The One comes
along.

The book certainly is a pacey, well written read peppered with hilarious situations and diversely interesting characters.
 

However, my problem with it is that there are just too many men. Towards the
end it gets a bit tiresome and the end itself is a tiny bit of a letdown. I
spotted a few editing errors too. Also, there were some sequences that didn’t
seem to go anywhere (like the plain
Jane episode). Of course since I read there’s a trilogy in the offing, we can
hope it will come together and maybe the end is not ‘The End’.

Other than
that ‘Men on my mind’ delivers all what it promises. It’s gutsy, sexy, provocative
and very very funny. If you’re looking for something light and fun, this is the
book to pick up.

This review is a part of the Book Reviews Program at BlogAdda.com.
Participate now to get free books.

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Mission accomplished

It’s pizza time folks. In case you don’t remember… the gym had a weightloss contest. I set myself a personal target of losing two kgs this month and I did it. Gosh I feel soooo good. I’m in the sixties.. 69 but still 60s. Yay!

The best part of the entire exercise was that everyone, with the exception of one or two girls, lost weight.. everyone .. from aunties in their sixties to girls barely out of their teens. What a happy time it was at the gym today as everyone got weighed. I loved the camaraderie all around. For once everyone was actually competing with their own selves, sharing diet and exercise tips. What fun this month has been.

While on weightloss, I’m reading a book by Yaana Gupta.. “How to love your body and get the body you love”. I found the title quite interesting and ordered it from Flipkart who seem to deliver books almost as soon as you press the ‘enter’ key on your computer.

The book has a section on smart weightloss. Yaana seems to have tried every diet under the sun and writes the pros and cons. She also talks about people like herself (and me) who are programmed to think of weightloss all the time. I found myself saying “ditto ditto ditto” each time she talks about her obsession with weightloss and ‘healthy’ eating. She says even ‘healthy eating’ shouldn’t be an obsession. And I’m kind of beginning to agree.

Sample this…. she talks of a time when she was trying to lose weight and dreamt of having a pizza she’d had sometime earlier. Says she, “The longer I was on that damn diet , the more I thought of that pizza and fantasised about it.” Sounds familiar, haan?

And when she finally does have it.. it didn’t taste as good as she’d imagined it would. So now I’m wondering whether Saturday would be such a treat after all!  🙁
The point she’s trying to make is.. don’t make your body crave for anything.

Maybe I’ll get to that stage someday.. after I reach 65kgs… maybe. For now I’ll try to “get the body I love” and maybe later I’ll try to “love the body I have.”

I’m halfway through the book. Of course I skipped ahead and read the bit about weightloss first. She says the same thing my trainer had told me.. “concentrate on weight training for sustained weightloss as it boosts your metabolism instead of just getting rid of calories through cardio”. Remember I’d promised myself  I’d do that? But there’s something so addictive about cardio I got caught up yet again.. So one more time.. the same resolution.. Less cardio, more weights. That even means lesser time at the gym.

Yes I know I’m going on and on about this whole thing. But then I’ve bored all my friends to tears with my obsession I couldn’t possibly leave out you guys. 🙂

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Memoirs of a Lucknow boy

Fans of flipkart raise your hands. Isn’t it just wonderful? As they get more and more popular their services only seem to get better. Last week I ordered a book and it arrived the very next day. Wow, thought I.
Then this morning I ordered four books and one of them was delivered just now. How’s that for promptness? I love this concept of piecemeal delivery of the order. It’s like they’re saying, “You start reading this one.. we’ll get the others ASAP”. And the Cash on Delivery Option is a dream.
Apparently, so well have they been doing, that they’ve launched their own courier service.

The book that arrived last week turned out to be a wonderful read — ‘Lucknow Boy A Memoir’ by Vinod Mehta. I am not a great fan of biographies, auto or otherwise. I got a surfeit of them when in school and found a lot of them boring. Then a friend recommended Andre Agassi’s “Open” and I loved it. That was what made me look at ‘Lucknow Boy’. I have to confess though, the Lucknow connection was the clincher, rather than a love for Vinod Mehta’s writings. I’ve seen him a lot of him in various debates on various television channels and have loved him for his irreverence more than anything else. This will sound silly but the picture I have of him is sitting at one such panel flanked by some nattily dressed panel members while carelessly sporting a bright bright red shirt.

As anticipated I did enjoy the Lucknow bit. In fact the first part of the book makes it a must read for every Lucknowite. Somethings he says of Lucknow resonate strongly with me.. sample this..

“Lucknow bestowed on me one priceless gift. It taught me to look at the individual rather than his religion or caste or the tongue he spoke….” Later he adds.. “…for me Muslims meant korma, Christians meant cake and pastries, Sikhs meant hot halwa, Anglo-Indians meant mutton cutlets, Parsees meant dhansak. The solitary Jewish family in town did not come withon my grasp, so I aplogize for excluding them.”… That’s my kind of man, I thought.

Also..
“Some of my better-educated, more doctrinaire friends usually discuss secularism, composite culture and the syncretic tradition…I breathed the secularism they talk of, the composite culture flows in my veins, the syncretic tradition is something I observed daily as I rode my bicycle from Firangi Mahal to Sanyal Club. I didn’t pick up my secularism from books or at university or from protest demos. For me it was a lived reality.”

That’s not all. Armed with a third class BA degree from the Lucknow University he travels to Britain. That’s where he transforms himself from that small frog in the well to a well read, well informed individual. The rest of the book talks about his editorial journey, which is even more more interesting. Someone who starts his journalistic career as the editor of Debonair can’t really be boring. Other than that he launched three newspapers only to be sacked from each of them. I liked his sense of fairness of giving media space to points of view that may/may not coincide with his own. And I loved his candour..from admitting his temper tantrums (“I was under the misapprehension that all great editors had to be ‘difficult'”) to the gravest of errors to a child he abandoned.

Towards the end he gives some ‘Sweeper’s wisdom’ to aspiring journos. I also loved the section ‘Some people’ where he gives his impressions on people ranging from Shobha De to VS Naipaul and Rushdie. Quite enjoyable.
+++++++++++

‘Lucknow Boy’ put me on the path of some more books, which are the ones I ordered today. Mehta heavily recommends George Orwell’s writings. While I’ve read a lot about his books, specially Animal Farm and 1984, I never got down to reading them. Also, I thought it would be fun to read more of Lucknow’s history and so included a book on that too.

‘1984’ was delivered today and I’m looking forward to a quiet evening with the kids down for the day.

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