Someone at a Distance is a heartbreaking story of an ordinary upper middle class British family is so gripping. I have read no other work by Dorothy Whipple, so am not aware of her style of narrative. I enjoyed this from a literary point of view, but I found the book oddly regressive to feminism. Let me start with the plot, which, as the blurb shows, is ‘deceptively simple’. The Norths are a happy, self-contained family…
I was in a shock of total five minutes when our car left the Delhi airport driveways and hit the main road. The state of Indian traffic, congestion and chaos had passed into deep recesses of my brain and it was pulled back rudely into the front with a jolt. As our cab weaved in and out of insanely blocked lanes, my heart skipped a few beats. My mind took a few minutes to locate some…
There is nothing wrong with the overall plot, and how it can that be, since it’s inspired from Jane Austen’s Emma, but the Bollywood movie “Aisha” falters appallingly in the execution. The story is really simple. Aisha, a super rich, good-for-nothing, rich Delhi girl passes her time setting up people together. The movie begins when she finds her new project, Shefali (Amrita Puri), a middle class girl in need of a groom. Aisha sets her…
Experiencing the Key West in A Day ! Wild, but possible! Some of the most beautiful beaches in the US are found in a group of islands off the coast of South Florida known as “The Keys”. Connected to the mainland by the 100 mile National Highway 1, these islands offer the whole gamut of conventional and unconventional tourist activities. The Keys are logically and geographically divided into 3 segments – the Upper Keys which…
I am not the kind of person who typically drools over actors or even fan-girls except for maybe something like Lord Of The Rings and The X-files. I either like certain people’s work or admire specific stories, styles of storytelling or directing. But when I saw the BBC’s contemporary “Sherlock” starring Benedict Cumberbatch ( yes, his real name!), I have to admit I was utterly Cumberbatched! I have never been so taken in by an…
The Harry Potter & The Deathly Hallows movies had a lot to live up to when it came to fan expectations. For the book readers, who had been on the journey much longer than the movie fans, it was the final closing chapter of the Harry Potter series. At that point in 2011, no one knew that Rowling would have an equally hard time letting go of the characters and would end up writing a…
British humor has its own identity; wry, genteel, steeped in sarcasm, slightly tongue-in-cheek. All writers have their own style, but there is something inherently similar in the language and narrative. I always find similarities between Charles Dickens, Elizabeth Gaskell and PG Wodehouse with their mostly country house settings, caricaturized protagonists and situational humor. I also measure every other British humorist against them, which probably doesn’t help my reading at all, as it happened with Miss Mapp by…
My thoughts on whether focus on STEM only growth interferes with the overall intellectual growth of the country. Should everyone end up in technology?
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