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…
Culture
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…
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…
When No Strings Attached was released, Natalie Portman was riding high on the success of Black Swan, and predictably everyone was going gaga over her role in this movie. Catching the movie six months after, it doesn’t look so hot. Let’s talk about the storyline: two people keep bumping into each other and finally hook up for no strings attached sex agreement stating if one of them falls in love agreement ends. Obviously, we all know where…
When I started reading From the Holy Mountain by William Dalrymple, I struggled to put things in context as it covered the history and the current existence of Christian monasteries in the countries of Turkey. I figured to make sense of it all, I needed to read the history of Turkey – Wikipedia wasn’t going to be enough. I chanced upon “A Traveller’s History of Turkey” in the library. This book is a cliff notes version…
With the explosion of technology in the world of multimedia, the possibilities of visual effects are limitless. And because of that, it’s driving the type of movies that are being made. Though I don’t have any statistical data, I am pretty sure that the numbers of sci-fi, fantasy, animated movies that are coming through are much higher than ever before. This also means that there are few movies that stand out. However, when I saw…
