I travel and read.
I find my professional skills often spill into my personal life, which I spin into analogies in the midnight thinking hour. I met my husband based on the sheer power of content(marketing?) and an online database. Any disillusionment I ever had with my job, was quelled by this logic. I was working as a marketer for... Continue Reading →
My father is a prophet. Just like my mother was before him. She died. I hope he doesn’t. He is the only prophet left for me. Before I left my job to sit at home and write, cushioned by my husband’s handsome salary, my dad had prophesied that a day will soon arrive when I... Continue Reading →
It has been a long while since I wrote a book review. Exactly two years to be precise. The reasons for not being consistent with reviewing the books I read don’t matter, the reason for writing a review after 2 years of drowning in books matter. This book is phenomenal, period. I have never read... Continue Reading →
There is no excerpt because this is a protected post.
I have always been in awe of this writer Khushwant Singh. When I was in school, I remember a notorious classmate bring Khushwant Singh’s autobiography “Truth, Love and a little Malice” and the entire class had a field day reading the parts where he describes his sex life explicitly. Train to Pakistan is different, it... Continue Reading →
The Ministry of Utmost Happiness, Or The Dungeon of Utmost Unhappiness? This heavy tome of a book ain’t gonna make you happy. But does that mean you should not read it? No, that means you should jump headlong into it. Get sucked by this dementor of a novel, And arise with a mind that knows... Continue Reading →
A woman has a grotesque dream and turns into a vegetarian when she wakes up. In South Korea where they love their meat, this decision turns her own husband and family against her. But things turn weirder when she does not stop at abstention from meat. She starts fantasizing herself as a plant and stops... Continue Reading →
Book Review of Life of Pi, by Yann Martel When a story claims to make you believe in God, can a mere mortal not be intrigued? I saw “Life of Pi,” the movie, directed by Ang Lee years ago, and found the movie along with its 3D effects entertaining enough. Only when I began reading... Continue Reading →
Could fulfillment ever be felt as deeply as loss? Book review of “The Inheritance of Loss” by Kiran Desai. When I first started reading “The Inheritance of Loss”, I was excited because I was holding a Booker baby here, but 20 pages into the book, and I was not so excited anymore. I went into a slump, I... Continue Reading →
Book review of Perumal Murugan’s “One Part Woman” This book was banned in Tamil Nadu until the Hight Court ruled in favour of the author and prohibited the ban demanded by self-appointed gatekeepers of culture in the society. I found the entire ban thing ridiculous. Perumal Murugan has written a simple novel in a non-linear... Continue Reading →
Remember when you were a child, and you pestered your grandmother or aunt to tell you stories at night? And they would tell you stories that had been passed down from generations in the family, stories that would vary from mouth to mouth and end up as a fable customised by the storyteller. Oral stories... Continue Reading →
And a review on the brilliant “Laburnum for my head” by Temsula Ao The home page of sahitya-akademi.gov.in Sahitya Akademi Award, who? Indian youth today rants on Oscar winners, and Booker prizes. But ask them about their own country’s highest academic honor, and they fail miserably. Ask them about Indian Filmfare award, and the reaction would... Continue Reading →
How beautiful it is when you stumble upon a beautiful thing by serendipity? For me, it was a piece of poetry by Wilfred Owen, called Anthem for Doomed Youth. I found it when I picked up this book, Regeneration. Pat Barker won the Booker Prize for the third instalment in this trilogy, “The Ghost Road,”... Continue Reading →
“Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe” by Fannie Flagg. We need to read books that talk about togetherness, in the time of He Who Is Too Disgusting To Be Named. Books that have characters who used to laugh and love their neighbours. Books that bring fresh hope for a life that can be... Continue Reading →
“The hundred-year-old man who climbed out of the window and disappeared”. Wordy right? The immediate feeling I had when I picked up the book was that geriatrics would very well mumble something like that in general conversation. I became nostalgic and went back to a long lost rainy afternoon spent with my hundred-year-old grandma (umm,... Continue Reading →
A review of the book by Paul Kalanithi, "When breath becomes air"
Inspired by Stephen King’s “On Writing: A memoir of the craft” “If you don’t have time to read, you don’t have the time (or the tools) to write. Simple as that.” ― Stephen King, in his book On Writing Many of my friends ping me on Facebook and Instagram with messages ranging from innocuous... Continue Reading →
A book review of "Boats on Land", a short story collection by Janice Pariat, a talented writer from Shillong.
Beedi Queen 
satta king