Book review: Two Brothers by Ben Elton

Berlin, 1920. Two babies are born. Two brothers. United and indivisible, sharing everything. Twins in all but blood. As Germany marches towards its Nazi Armageddon, the ties of family, friendship and love are tested to the very limits of endurance. And the brothers are faced with an unimaginable choice…which one of them will survive?

The novel follows the Stengel family – Frieda, a community doctor, and Wolfgang, a Jazz musician, and their sons Otto and Paulus. The young couple works hard to make ends meet. But in 1920s Germany, when the country was reeling under the aftermath of the Great War, things aren’t always easy. Wolfgang gets lucky, though, when he meets Kurt, “Germany’s new kindergarten entrepreneurs, crazy alcohol- and drug-fuelled chancers” who loves jazz music and gives him a well-paying job at a nightclub. But once the crazy inflation is brought under control, Wolfgang finds himself, once again, unemployed. At Frieda’s insistence, he places an ad in the paper offering to teach music. And then enters Dagmar Fischer – the heiress to the Fischer fortune. And both Otto and Paulus fall head-over-heels in love with her – a love that lasts a lifetime and changes the course of their life.Continue reading→

Recipe: Creole Chicken

Once upon a time, I hated cooking. I used to start pouting and grumbling around 4:00 pm every day while at work, just because I knew I would have to go home and cook a full Indian meal – roti, vegetable, dal. After about a year of sobbing my way through it, I finally told the husband I’d had enough. We hired a cook.

Then, about two years ago, I found myself in the kitchen again. Not on a daily basis. Just on the occasional weekend. And I never cooked a typical Indian meal. It was always the “exotic” – pasta, Italian main courses, Chinese…And I enjoyed it….and found that I was actually really good at it!

Then, a couple of weeks ago, while grocery shopping, I found a bottle of Discovery Creole Season and Sauce. As I read the ingredients on the label, a recipe started forming itself in my head. I grabbed the bottle, ran to the vegetable counter to pick up some red and green peppers, and then dashed to the meat counter to pick up some chicken. I came home with a fully formed recipe in my head. And when I was done, I took a taste. And I was in heaven!

It’s easy, fairly quick, and it’s sure to go on your meal planner again and again! So, without further ado, I present to you: Creole chicken with boiled rice.Continue reading→

Book Review: Sophie Says by Judy Balan

Ever since I read Sophie Kinsella’s I’ve Got Your Number, I’ve developed a new-found love for “chick lit”. I thought it was all sugary sweet teeny-bopper love stories, and I really have outgrown those. But it isn’t! It’s romance all right, but pretty darn believable, told from a woman’s perspective with issues that modern women can totally relate to. But I’m still skeptical about Indian chick-lit, largely because I’m skeptical about most Indian authors. So when I got an opportunity to review Judy Balan’s Sophie Says, I took it – mainly because the story sounded interesting.

Sophia Tilgum has dated all kinds of men in thirty years. Men who’ve stalked and pleaded, men who’ve lied and cheated, men who’ve written songs and wanted to play house after three dates. And equally scary, men who’ve sported hot-pink bow ties and called her Sweet Cheeks.

So after a decade-long attempt at sustaining long-term relationships, Sophie has finally thrown in the towel and has found her calling as The Breakup Coach via her super-popular blog: Sophie Says – in which she makes a case for Single-Singles or people who are wired to remain single (because according to Sophie, commitment phobia is not a real thing) and shares her many theories on breakups.

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Forget bucket lists, try a before I die list instead

Death. It’s inevitable. But still, it’s the one topic no one wants to talk about. When we hear of tragedy, we are thankful that it didn’t happen to us. We spend a major portion of our lives convinced about our own immortality. And still, death strikes. And when it strikes close to home, it forces us to look at death head-on.

So why is death such a scary monster? Is it because we are scared of leaving those we love behind, or because we don’t know exactly how long we have left on earth? Or is it because it’s the great unknown – after all, no one’s returned from the dead (and here I’m discounting near-death experiences) to tell us exactly what happens next. Or could it be because we still have so much more that we want to do…things that we’ve been putting off for a “later” that never comes?

Maybe that explains the popularity of bucket lists. But if you’re like me and want to do so many damn things that you know one lifetime would never be enough to do them, and that leaves you paralyzed wondering where to start, this TED Talk by Candy Chang may show you the path.Continue reading→

Book review: The Good Little Ceylonese Girl by Ashok Ferrey

Ashok Ferrey’s The Good Little Ceylonese Girl is a collection of short stories about Sri Lankans living in the country and abroad. This slim 193 page volume has 17 stories, all of them really quite short, presenting readers with little vignettes and fragments of his characters’ lives.

The poignant Dust is the story of Father Cruz and his fight with his parishioners, who want their donations used to beautify the church, whereas all he wants is to use the money to help the needy.

The toungue-in-check Maleeshya is a short account of how the editor of a high-flying society magazine arm twists those desperate for a mention in her magazine to conform to her vision of a marriage and even death.

Pig shows some of the similarities between Indian and Sri Lankan culture. It is the story of two childhood sweethearts Lalitha and Ruwan who grew up together but were married off to different people. They continued to meet clandestinely over the years. But when the time came for them to be able to get back together, Ruwan backed out because he realized, after 19 years of cheating on his wife, that Lalitha and he had changed:Continue reading→

Book review: The Sea of Innocence by Kishwar Desai

Goa, south India. A beautiful holiday hideaway where hippies and backpackers while away the hours. But beneath the clear blue skies lies a dirty secret…

Simran Singh, a 40-something social worker-come-crime investigator is holidaying in Goa with her teenage daughter Durga. All she wants is the sun, sand, and an idyllic, relaxed holiday. But all of that is spoilt when she gets a disturbing video clip featuring a young girl being attacked by a group of men. And then comes Amarjit, her on-again-off-again flame, to spoil her holiday.

He begs her to send Durga back home to Delhi and help him to find out what happened to the Liza, the girl in the video. Enter Marianne, her sister, who fills in some of the details of the crime but is deliberately vague about the exact timeline.

As Simran gets pulled into the case, she finds out more than she bargained for about Goa’s dark underbelly:

the web of lies and dark connections that flourish on these beaches. Everyone, it seems, knows what has happened to the girl but no one is prepared to say. And when more videos appear, and Simran herself is targeted in order to keep her quiet, the paradise soon becomes a living nightmare.

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Nigella Lawson and the can of worms known as domestic abuse

Nigella Lawson at a Borders book-signing (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

As images of celebrity chef Nigella Lawson being attacked by her art collector husband Charles Saatchi went viral online, it led to a maelstrom of debate that surrounds all narratives of celebrity domestic abuse.

The overt, more often implicit, blame was on Nigella for not “standing up for herself” and for going back to tweeting cutesy food pictures a couple of hours after the attack. Australian radio jockey Dee Dee Dunleavy went so far as to call for a boycott of Nigella’s books.

We think you are strong, beautiful and successful. We imagine your home is warm and smells of cinnamon, and if we dropped in we’d get a hug and a feed. We don’t like to think of you cowering from a thug. A man so boldly abusive he had no qualms about attacking you in public. Nigella, like it or not, you’re a beacon for women from all walks of life. If you want us to buy your books and watch your shows on how to run our kitchens, then we need you to make a stand on domestic violence.

This isn’t very different from the public outcry that greeted Rihanna’s decision to get back together with her ex-boyfriend Chris Brown, with whom she had split up after he physically assaulted her. (She has since broken up with him.)Continue reading→

Book review: The Virgins by Siddharth Tripathi

I wanted to read Dan Brown’s Inferno. In fact, I had just finished a book before I had to leave for work that day, and was anticipating going home and immersing myself in Robert Langdon’s world of art and Dante and symbology. Then, I received a review copy of The Virgins in the mail, and I was torn between Langdon and this book. I knew I would go through Inferno slowly, savoring the art and detail in the book. And that after that, most books would feel flat, even if they are actually good books. So I thought it only fair that I should finish reading The Virgins before losing myself in Inferno.

Set in Banaras, a town that’s famous as a Hindu pilgrimage spot and for it’s Banarasi saris, The Virgins is a story of three friends and their “sexpot” adventures. Guggi, the son of a local politician, is a spoilt rich brat who comes up with crazy ideas for fun and adventure. In one of their first “sexpot” adventures, the three friends stand outside the girls hostel of Banaras Hindu University as Guggi screams “Hey GIRLS, OPEN EVERYTHING….NOW!” As the girls freeze, a beat constable comes rushing onto the scene to apprehend the eve teasers. Guggi escapes on his scooter with Bandhu, while Pinku is left to fend for himself. As he is running away from the university with the cop at his heels, he realizes that being the poorest of the three, he is always the one who is left behind. Even his drunkard father had disappeared one day, leaving his mother alone to fend for her seven children. The 19-year old school dropout has only two dreams left: to open a cassette shop one day and to marry the plump girl who caught him stealing flower pots. As he is running away from the cop, Pinku promises himself that he will take on the job at Cheeni Chacha’s grocery store and walk on the straight and narrow, staying out of Guggi’s crazy plans.Continue reading→

Zombiefied: Social media and the rise of the zombie culture

“Why is Go Goa Gone a zombie movie? And come to think of it, why the hell is Brad Pitt doing a zombie movie?! ? Why? I hate zombies!”

“Relax, we are going to see a zombie apocalypse soon anyway.”

Those pearls of wisdom from the husband got me thinking – aren’t we, in a way, already seeing a zombification of society?

Traditionally, a zombie is an animated corpse resurrected by mystical means, such as witchcraft. The term is often figuratively applied to describe a hypnotized person bereft of consciousness and self-awareness, yet ambulant and able to respond to surrounding stimuli. (Wikipedia)

Look around you – at the mall, in the garden, on the road – and you’ll find people walking around with their nose buried in their smartphone. Chances are they’re either Tweeting or Facebooking or texting.Continue reading→

Book Review: Life of Pi by Yann Martel

Life of Pi (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Life of Pi is the story of Piscine Molitor Patel – known as Pi – a young, bookish boy whose life revolves around the hippos, hyenas, bears and other animals at his father’s zoo in Pondicherry, India. Curious by nature, Pi is deeply influenced by religion, and learns about and embraces three of them – Christianity, Hinduism and Islam. But his idyllic life at the zoo comes to an end when his father decides to pack up and move the family to Canada for a better life. They leave aboard a Japanese cargo ship called the Tsimtsum along with many of their animals, who are bound for zoos in the US. A few days into their journey, disaster strikes – their ship, along with most of the animals and the entire Patel family – bar Pi – sink to the depths of the ocean. 16-year old Pi finds himself on a lifeboat with a zebra, hyena, orang-utan and a Royal Bengal tiger named Richard Parker. Of course, the only animal to survive is Richard Parker, and Pi must share his lifeboat with him and hope for a miraculous rescue.

The book is hailed as a modern day classic, a glorious spiritual adventure that makes us question what it means to be alive, and to believe. But sadly, I found it lacking.Continue reading→