Thursday, January 19, 2006

Clueless & Co - Pratik Basu

A nice tongue in cheek book by the ex Disney Chief. The book switches between a first person account of a guy's life in a pipe company and the misadventures of a Rahul Banerjee who is out to join as a partner in a dubious marketing reseach organization.
Although a bit of marketing jargon in the book might put-off the reader, the book does grow on you and u actually appreciate it in the end and the best part is that the book is that its funny throughout unlike in bits and pieces whether its the 'piss project' of Tapas Pan (Rahul's second partner) or the Big Brother incident.
Like Chetan Bhagat mentions, 'contemporary indian literature is evolving...' there are a lot of books, specially fiction that are being published by first time authors.. most of them make a light read and are very much enjoyable...

Wednesday, January 18, 2006

Kalki Selected Stories


In the past couple of months I have read some of the best short stories written by our authors and suprisingly (or maybe not) some of the best ones have been written during the freedom struggle, specially the early 1900s. I picked up Kalki's selected stories on an impulse and it was a revelation, specially the first story. Its the story of ladies school principal who would have lost the love of her life to illiteracy. The irony is the tail is simply marvelous.
Most of the stories have been picked from the immensely popular magazine started by Kalki and have been translated from Tamil by his grand-daughter. Simple language, very basic background but each with a charm of its own. Most of the plots in the later half of the book, you will realise have already been used in a lot of south indian movies and talk a lot of the authors inclination to the freedom struggle, more so of the non-violent types..
Although some parts of it might be little difficult to comprehend for non-tams like me, its still recommended....

Monday, January 02, 2006

False Impression - Jeffrey Archer


"Not a penny more, not a penny less" was the first Jeffrey Archer that i read and till date none of his book has been able to reach its level. Kane & Abel was good and successful, but then he started repeating the same old "Two rich guys fighting it out" story in every other book of his, including the last one, Sons of fortune (which by the way was crass).. So i guess one day out of the blue, he decides i will try to be a bit 'hatke'! and maybe during that time he was reading the sidney sheldon series and so Mr. Archer in the process of being different now has a female protogonist, but then he didn't want to be blamed of plagarism (after having already spent time in prison for perjury!), he decides to have make the villian a female too..
Well the story uses 9/11 as the background although the plot is not even remotely related to the incident, with Anna being fired by Fenston Finances for helping out one of their clients and she being the protogonist (meaning an extremely lucky woman....coz she always manages to escape the FBI and the professional killer!!!) manages to alert the client and save the one thing that Mr. Fenston is actually after.. the self potrait of Van Gogh... and not suprisingly ends up falling in love with the FBI agent.
Might make a good thriller movie but as a book... totally avoidable