Quo Vadis?

Romeo & Juliet, the classic tragedy by Shakespeare, reimagined and adapted to the music of AR Rahman, presented by a Dance Company. The show was produced by an actress / dancer with a film back ground that should ensure good production values in addition to good media coverage. The sum of it all seemed to be a Sunday evening well spent when I bought the tickets for yesterday’s performance. The show started half an hour late which was a good thing considering the parking challenges and the traffic, the sparse crowd in the balcony also gave us a choice of seats in the free seating Music Academy.  The opening credits started with the National Award winning “Chinna Chinna Aasai” that made me feel warm inside and look forward to the evening ahead. The stage had very basic props with one gazebo hardly being used and seemed to be taking up unnecessary space, the famous Juliet’s Balcony however on the other end of the stage was used more and despite the lack of height it s...

This Saturday I had the pleasure of going for a blogger event.  Off late various reasons made me miss a few events and I was happy to sign up as the topic was on food. Food tends to make people emotional.  If you have seen me you will know that I get very emotional about food and though I still believe that the best food is always home cooked I am always ready to try out a new restaurant any day. The invite intrigued me because it wanted 5 food bloggers and 5 tech bloggers & the event was in an IT park so my curiosity levels went up. The venue was the office of M/s Owl Tech blew me away. The exposed brickwork, furniture made from stacking pallets among others made it a good place to be in. I met up with a few familiar faces and some new faces and we settled down to learn about the place and the event. The Ice breaker! Note the table made of pallets. Our hosts for the day Divya Gandhi and Abhiskek N gave us a brief of the machine, a food box that we would see a...

This is a special post; it is special because this is about a compilation of short stories. It is also special because I have also written one of the 21 stories in the compilation. Without much ado I will jump right in and focus on the other stories that are in the book. I will refrain from focusing on the individual stories because they span various genres, styles and timelines. They are tied together by a few threads; the first being they are set in Chennai, this book was spurred by the Chennai floods and each of the authors had been affected by the flood in one way or the other, the majority of the authors are amateur bloggers and this is possibly their maiden published piece. Let me first get the good things out of the way: -           The compilation merited a publisher and this shows that the book has touched people even before it hit the stands -           The beautiful fore...

I have been on a book reading binge and giving my feedback to the authors. This is my first unsolicited feedback of two books by debutant authors. One of the authors has gone on to write few more books so it may be very late but as they say better late than never. The first book is “You, me and a secret” by Ganga Bharani . This was on my list for a long time and finally I managed to read it. The book starts off with a very interesting premise of the protagonist waking up after a memory loss and trying to reconstruct her past life. The author builds up the plot and takes it to a climax where it all unravels. There are a few gaps in the plot and the climax is rather contrived and seems like an afterthought. There is a lot of promise in the plot and shows that the author will go far with time and experience.  It is a love story, with thrill, crime, emotions but at the end the book leaves you wanting for a better finish that would have done justice to the initial promis...

This is my second attempt at giving my feedback for a novel. I am sticking to feedback as I am still a little wary of calling it a review, more so when the book in question is the fourth of the author. My doubts were partly laid to rest by the author who reached out and got my address to send a copy for my feedback. Thank you Meera Shivashankar for the lovely personal touch. I liked the cover though after reading the book the couple on the cover looked alien to the story. The interesting cover font and the thoughtfulness of the handwritten note inside made me take up the book on priority. There were some nice touches in the start of the book with two forewords that were engaging and they spurred the interest in me. The foreword and the list of characters further piqued my interest. The book is a quick read and took me 100 odd minutes but I will read it again to savour and soak in the beauty of the writing. There is some lovely wordplay throughout the book and some beaut...

I am not competent to review books but having read the debut novel of Bragadeesh Prasanna , a blogger I like and a person I admire for many reasons I thought I should give my views on the same. This novel made me do a couple of firsts, I actually overcame my aversion to reading novels on devices and finally downloaded a Kindle app for my desktop and my phone for this novel, I finished this novel on these two devices at a stretch and found that it was an interesting experience. It is a romantic novel and it goes by the name 300; the reason behind the name is given in the novel and I wondered if this name or rather the pet name of one of the protagonists should have graced the cover since it was repeated several times in the book. Those who are fans of the Gautham Menon style of story-telling will like this book, it appears semi- autobiographical, heavily referenced from real life, moves at a languid pace, lots of detailing with small quirks that the viewers may scoff outw...