Posts

Showing posts from April, 2010

Short and Sweet

Short stories of fiction are beautiful. I find them better than novels. Novels twist and turn or drag and drone. Short stories are simple. Then constitute of a simple line of thought, often about simple feelings or people and places and pets and petals. They are about everyday life; talking of houses and relations and trees and cities. Hence I decided that the novel I write would consist of short stories. They would be stand alone short stories interwoven to constitute a novel. All I need now is an underlying theme. City? Road? River? Monument? Animal/Bird? House? Journey? Beach? CCD? Class?

Glassy Eyes

Image
I read The Glass Palace by Amitav Ghosh. It was long and talked about lives of different people and different places. I like the cover design. The title sounds nice. But I felt it lost its meaning mid way. I felt it could have been done better. The story starts in Mandalay where Rajkumar works at a small stall on the streets and Dolly takes care of the second princess in the palace. The palace has a chamber full of mirrors and crystal decorations called the Glass Palace. Rajkumar married Dolly much later in Ratnagiri and takes back to Burma where he owns a timber farm. They are infinite number of characters, their relations, their children, their deaths, their engagements, and their experiences. Obviously there are a lot of people in this world! There is the world war and then the second and the Japs intrusion and the freedom struggle. Rajkumar and Dolly’s younger son Dinu puts up a photo studio in Myanmar calling it the Glass Palace wear Jaya, the grandchild of the couple a

The Edge of Chaos

Image
I like that phrase ‘the edge of chaos’, whatever that means! I completed ‘ The Lost World ’ by Michael Crichton. No, I have not read ‘Jurassic Park’. Yes, they are a sequence. No, you don’t need to read the later to understand the former. Yes, I watched both the movies. No, I remember nothing except huge dinosaurs (and one type of small dino as well). Even as I read the book I could not recollect the movie because I remember the movie to be dark and scary with random dinosaurs popping in everywhere. It was too random. And there were these two kids and Jeff Goldblum and one old man with a white hair and beard. And yeah, those huge beautiful waterfalls next to which the helicopter lands (Angel falls I believe). No, there is no mention of the waterfalls near the helipad in the book. It was really good to read some parts of the book where Ian Malcom talks. He talks about theories and ideas and how mankind never seemed to understand it all. He talks of how after your brai

Ka Ching!

Image
The Moneychangers by Arthur Hailey was, well honestly, a good read. It talked about something I could relate to sort of. It talked about banks and how they loan out money to companies and how the companies might not be surviving yet be able to manipulate balance sheets to put up a good show and of course how eventually all of them go down taking the banks down with them. Interestingly real! Also it talked about how ambitions to the rise of power bite competition away. It talks of two men fighting to the president of a bank when one of them makes a big mistake of a big loan and gets sucked up into it ending in suicide. It beats me how the author makes the reader feel that it’s a mistake right from the beginning while the guy fails to see it himself but how he got so high up the ladder without being able to see such mistakes is an enigma to me! Oh also, the author makes sure the reader always takes one guy’s side. So now you have a good guy and a bad guy. The bad guy commits suicide a