SlishaCrazy

3.5/5 rating Dara | National Theatre I'm very ignorant about history and that's something I've been trying to correct but the vastness of it all is a bit overwhelming. So when K and I booked tickets to a play called Dara, it was only because we found the marketing summary interesting - that Dara was one of Aurangzeb's older brothers and that it's a Pakistani play adapted in English for the NT. The only history we knew was that Aurangzeb imprisoned his father and killed his brothers to ascend to the throne. When I mentioned to my mother, who has a bachelor's in Indian history, that I was going to a play titled Dara, she told me he was a poet and a painter, and a patron of Islam art in the golden Mughal era. With the downfall of the Mughal empire not long after Aurangzeb, there were many discussions of an alternative history of the country had Dara become the ruler. So what I originally expected, a little known and well imagined rivalry between broth...

The book began with a bang. A man found in a landslide, in a very precarious condition at a very  disputed site and with no memory whatsoever - this is the beginning of a story that you can do so much with. And this is probably a very Bollywood style story too.  The first third of the book is little slow with our protagonist (Mano, he remembers it in a while) trying to find his bearings and beginning to understand his problem. The second third of the book runs and pulls you along with it. It gets better and our Mano is a man with a mission to go around the country and figure out who he is and where he comes from. And all this while the police, the NIA, the army, everyone is looking for a potential terrorist on the run. Is Mano an ordinary guy caught in the extraordinary? Is he an insurgent helping the militants bringing supplies across the border? Is he pretending or has he really lost his complete memory? When he gets his memory will he turn dangerous? How did he ...

It's hard to say what defines me. Passions define people. I love to read.  It's almost like travel, I keep going into different worlds with the help of different books. I love to write. Although I haven't written as much as I would like to due to lack of time, I'm so engrossed in it when I write that I get hyper when I'm interrupted. I love travel. To see new places, understand the culture, learn a few words in their language, and then write about it. I love to sing, all the time. As I grew up I've learnt to sing in my head but I'm happier singing aloud at the top of my voice. I love acting, especially monoacting. I loved math when I was growing up and in engineering I realised I don't love math enough to love all the hypothetical math, but I continue to love it in its simplicity and use that at work everyday. I love the internet. This may be a slightly odd thing to say but I love to search for things and read up on them. Once I get into Wikipedia look...

'And' is such an interesting word. At a people management course, I was once asked to replace 'but' with 'and', and suddenly things that you disagreed with became things that you could potentially agree with if improvised upon. Now Gillette is asking us to replace 'or' with 'and', and you no longer need to compromise. This post is a part of  #UseYourAnd  activity at  BlogAdda  in association with  Gillette Venus . When I decided to write about my journey from OR to AND, I thought about it and I couldn't come up with a story. And then I realised that, I had shut my ears to anyone who told me that OR was an option. It wasn't. I had been taking the route of an AND since I was a child. Schooling defines who you become. I absolutely love my schooling and my school friends. It is the place where I grew up and learnt to have confidence in me, to speak in front of people, to lead people. I owe my school a lot. But it was not always the...

Usually I wait to review a book till after I have read it. But here I would like to capture what I feel before finishing the book because somehow apparently the ending is so awesome it is worth the drudgery. Actually even if the ending wasn't supposed to be awesome. I'm going to finish the book. Because I'm so close. 90% complete. I read the first 100 pages trying hard to get involved with the characters and the story but could not. It took me about 200 to 300 pages to get into the story even though there isn't any story to be honest. It's just our lady wanting to write a remarkable piece of literature that some told her, is about descriptions and on and on she goes describing. She describes a scene for some 30 pages and some 100 pages later our protagonist will remember that incident and yet again our writer describes it for 5-10 pages more like as though she has set her mind on using a thesaurus exhaustively such that there are no more adjectives, descriptive...

I happened upon an event this Saturday and it turned out to be a great one! BlogAdda has some passes to Sheroes in Your City events across the country for members. I registered for the event in Hyderabad at Radisson last Saturday. And to be honest, I wanted to go just because I had not been to a conference as such. I am not an entrepreneur and didn't really consider it an option for myself. But the event was thoroughly inspiring for me! So I can only imagine how anyone with an entrepreneurial spirit would have felt! For all those of you interested, there are some more coming up, check here . (I only have one picture and the light is bad but here it is anyway) To begin with we had TiE Hyderabad president (one of the sponsors of the event), Murali Bukkapatnam who spoke on entrepreneurship and why people choose it. A very informative and inspiring speech, he quoted Tagore on freedom, a few Sankrit slokas on women empowerment and even a song by an African woman that asks for n...

It's about time someone made things out of Lego, no? When I was growing up I didn't have Lego blocks exactly but a friend had them and they give these infield possibilities to build anything you like. It's extremely interesting and inspiring for young. Or so I thought. Recently when I was trying to buy something for some kid and thought of Legos, I found out that all the infinite possibilities have been reduced to only one single possibility per box you buy. And it's Lego that retains are the infinite possibilities that it sells as infinite sets of boxes, and deprives the parents of infinite money and children of their imagination which was what in the first place made Lego blocks so fantastic. I digress, but I think it's important to point out. Anyway, now that I explained how Lego lost its intrinsic brand value let's move on to the originally envisaged infinite possibilities of the generation that grew up with regular Lego. And it made me wonder how awes...