What I've been up to

Now that I’ve started working from home, I’ve started reading voraciously and I love the anticipation of deciding which book to read next, thinking about the books, and then occasionally, blogging about them. So my next few blogs are some book reviews.

Kitchen Confidential - Anthony Bourdain

I love "No Reservations", a show hosted by Anthony Bourdain, a no-nonsense, bad-ass guy who also happens to be a chef. He's brutal about the restaurant business, absolutely detests vegetarians and spares no bones (no pun intended) with anyone in the food industry. I see him as the "ultimate cool guy"; raw, unapologetic, gritty, creative and adventurous.

His memoir does not disappoint; I didn't really get all the French and Italian words related to cuisine, but learnt some new ones. A fast-paced, very well-written read.

Rant – Chuck Palahniuk

Chuck Palahniuk is at it again with another of his bizarre novels. His protagonist is as usual, a bored-out-of-his-mind suburban kid who likes to contract and spread rabies. He then joins a club where people bang into each-other’s cars to achieve immortality. It gets weirder, but I’ll spare you the details. Two words should suffice here – “skip it”; watch/read the “Fight Club” instead.

The Language Instinct - Steven Pinker

My favorite of the lot. It talks about how language is “hard-wired” into all humans, and gives explanations about how language evolves over time; why kids exposed to more than one language pick up languages much better than adults; and (surprisingly) how deaf-dumb people pick up the sign language. Of course, the best part about it was that it was scientific enough for me to appreciate it; while at the same time explained in lay terms.

In the Miso soup - Ryu Murakami

Fast moving thriller. I liked the intimate look at Japan’s sex industry, and the seemingly orthogonal view of Japanese culture and the woman’s place in the work force in their society. It seems to be a very male dominated society; teens are extremely fashion-conscious, and lonely, while adult women seem to be very regressive and following in the men’s heels. I might be making some really untrue statements here, but that’s what I thought after reading the book, and from scenes from Babel.

The New Life - Orhan Pamuk

“The New Life” – a little too esoteric and out there for my taste, I picked up this book because I thought I’d try something different. I was a little disappointed that I didn’t quite enjoy the book. I love the way time-space seems to collide and intersect in movies, but I just didn’t feel it in the book.

Yet another cliché of a movie

1. The title is the one I hated the most - it's regressive, the word "daag" seems straight out of a medieval novel, and I feel really angry about it, and that's why it doesn't figure anywhere on this blog post.

2. Jaya is definitely trying to usurp Nirupa Roy from the not-so-desirable position of whining mom, helpless wife and sacrificing mother. She seems almost demented in some scenes.

3. Give us a minute dose of reality, and we the viewers will willingly take it. But oops...we're talking about Yash Raj movies here. The mansion of a house (which of course is justified as a white elephant); the late night sewing sessions of the aforementioned self-sacrificing mom in darkness, the Catlic sidekicks with bad Hindi/English, cliché after cliché of ghise-peete dialogues - here's one - "I'm marrying you because you're the only (whore) who knows her Hanuman chalisa"!! What! - where did this come from? As far as Suketu's novel goes, most of the sex workers come from very poor families, and are very god-fearing.

4. One last silver lining - I'm sure the classical purists hate her for selling out to mass media, but I quite liked the Shubha Mudgal's remixed version of the title track.