Skip to main content

Unladylike by Radhika Vaz

I read Unladylike by the stand-up comedian Radhika Vaz sometime in 2016 and remember posting about it on my Facebook wall then. I went back to retrieve the post and saw that this is what I'd written:

"Finished reading 'Unladylike' by Radhika Vaz. I think it's a must-read for wannabe Green Card holders coz she talks about the whole process right from writing her GRE to her teaching assistantship to studying in the US/ life in the US...I just felt like I was re-living my friends' lives all over again. In fact, she even took advertising like some of my friends did. So! I didn't get much out of the book coz it was almost like a how-to manual albeit her memoir, and not that funny!

I follow her Facebook page and listen to her live chat occasionally. Today, she was addressing the 'sex addict' Harvey Weinstein. She said it was disgusting how sex addicts could be accepted in society while people with mental illnesses were treated like outcasts. ( Paraphrasing here)

She addressed the issue of addiction and said next week more information about her battles with addiction would follow.

She also ranted against Chetan Bhagat for tweeting about banning firecrackers, saying he should be addressing more important issues faced by society.

After listening to her rant on for a looooo----oooong time, I suddenly wondered why I was still tuned in. I was under the impression she was a stand-up comedian. But she is mostly 'in your face', 'aggressive' and unfunny. She should become a social commentator. 

I posted a comment saying I had read her book and that I had recommended it to a friend of mine who was also tuned in to the show.( Facebook lets you see all sorts of things).

The live feed really sobered me up. Not that I was drunk, but I was pleasantly happy. Now I'm just feeling chastised. Although not as much as some poor dude who happened to piss her off. She mercilessly decimated him and that made me wonder why these men are still going to her site just to get torn apart. LOL. Masochists!




Comments

Popular posts from this blog

The Collected Schizophrenias by Esme Weijun Wang - A Book Review

  This book has been on my TBR since the time it was featured in The New Yorker in 2019.  I bought the Kindle edition recently and read it over 2-3 days. The author Esmé Weijun Wang is an American writer who has written the novel, The Border of Paradise (2016) and The Collected Schizophrenias (2019). She has received the Whiting Award and was named a Best Young American Novelist by Granta magazine.   Wang has been diagnosed with a slew of health issues: schizoaffective disorder— bipolar type, idiopathic peripheral neuropathy, fibromyalgia, complex PTSD, dysautonomia/POTS, chronic Lyme disease, and the extremely rare cotard’s delusion and capgras syndrome.   Wang calls her book “the collected schizophrenias” to include all the diseases that go into this basket, including schizoaffective disorder, schizophrenia, and schizotypal personality disorder. Since she was into psychological research herself, her awareness about these matters ...

My Book Review of 'Bitch Goddess for Dummies'

Recently, I attended a zoom session on chick lit by the Chennai Lockdown Literary Festival (CLLF). In the session, one of the speakers was Maya Sharma Sriram. I was so impressed with the way she conducted the session and answered the questions that I decided to pick up her chick lit novel, ‘Bitch Goddess for Dummies’ brought out by Rupa Publications in 2012. And I was not disappointed. I’m not sure if I was biased toward the book by the personality I had seen on zoom or not, but I quite enjoy chick lit and have read several chick lit novels in my thirties.   So the novel is about a 27-year-old woman Mira Iyer who decides to transform her personality from good girl to ‘bitch goddess’ to deal with the people in her life. Her mom who is constantly trying to fix her up with some eligible guy so that she can get married and Sanya, the real office bitch who is always cosying up to their bosses and vying for a promotion, are just two of the people in her life causing her angst. So it’s go...

Ray Bradbury and Ma Perkins rule my heart

Ray Bradbury is a literary giant. I read one of his short stories recently. This prompted me to go looking for his book of short stories that I'd picked up years ago, which was languishing unread in my home library. The book cover tells me he is the winner of the 2007 Pulitzer prize special citation, winner of the 2004 National medal of arts, and a couple of other literary honours. This collection of stories is called ' We'll always have Paris'. But this title story is not my favourite. This one is about two men. A married man who leaves his sleeping wife in the room and goes out for a walk, following another man who leads him through the streets of Paris only to kiss him goodbye. They don't understand each other's language. The way the story was told, I took this to mean he was gay and was checking if the married man was, too. But the married man who was charmed with this man decided he wasn't and went back to his sleeping wife, forgetting all about t...