Voices

I watched Interstellar two days after it was released on a lazy Sunday morning with a big fat tub of popcorn and one of my closest friends with me in a chilly multiplex.That isn't where our story begins though. That Friday when the movie was released  my brother had threatened to spill the bean and later on after watching it all I heard from him was something akin to a 'Meh'. So much for expectations ! Being from a place where you overhear people discuss string theory over steamy idlis I had the opportunity to talk to a few very different people about the movie. One of my friends who is an aspiring physicist told me that he found the movie appalling. It would have been okay if it had chosen to show light sabres or warp or any impossibility like the Star Trek/Wars series which might be explained by future technology and is put in an already non-realistic environment. However interstellar had goofed up already know things; it had shown things that we know fo...

I'm just done with the last book in the Magician's trilogy by Lev Grossman : "The Magician's Land".  It wouldn't be fair if I did not write about the whole series, but that will have to wait for another day. I'm a big fan of fantasy series and have tried my hand at reading many; Harry Potter, HPMOR, Inheritance Cycle, Narnia, Radiance and Luminosity and so on.. Magician's is one of the few that stood out. The qualities that made it stand out such as the gritty reality you encounter in each book, the humanness and imperfections of each character, questions on what this alternate reality would do to the human world and what would people with such a power do with their lives (unlike the pursuit of say, defeating a mysterious dark lord and nothing thereafter!), are still there in the last book. It achieves what many series' fail to do: it lets the main character grow up naturally and become someone else, someone different from who set o...

Credits : Photos.com A couple snuggled into each other on a park bench, a four year old boy swinging between the arms of his parents, two boys threading through the traffic in their grey uniforms, shouting at each other and anyone who cares to listen or the baby girl above in the arms of her father; these are some of the things that most of us see, most probably more often that not. How people interact with each other is perhaps one of the most interesting things you can observe (without creeping them out, of course!), that too tirelessly. I do this too, when I feel lost or confused about things going on in my life (more on that later) but that isn't what this post is attributed to; it is to point out a few rather worrying unifying features I've found in my country's social fabric. Made more worrisome by the fact that it is like long-term depression; you've had it for so long that it feels like a part of yourself. I don't know how much of this is...