Ash Talks Books

Finished reading Rekha: the untold story by Yasser Usman. She has apparently played a courtesan in over 30 films! So methinks her entire allusion to Amitabh Bacchan as the important 'him' in her life and her earlier insinuations of an affair with him were self- serving to her carefully built image, cemented by 'Silsila'. Affair or not, she has learnt to finally deny it to the press now and move on beyond her doomed marriage to Mukesh the businessman, for whose suicide she was blamed. Now she is the quintessential diva and more reams of newsprint should be devoted to how she has financially supported her rather large family of sisters with not much help from anyone else. Well-written biography. Plot spoilers ahead: Suicide Notes by Michael Thomas Ford. When I read the sample I didn't know what the book would be about except that it was about a teen who'd tried to kill himself, who had a good sense of humour about it and was admitted in the psych ward by hi...

Yesterday I read “Of love and otherabandonments: Poems of heartbreaks, heartbeats and heartsprings” by Sunil Bhandari. I got to know of this book through a link pasted on the Senior Reading Raccoons Facebook Group. Out of the 93 pages of poems interspersed with a few photographs, my favourites were the following poems: Getting drenched Togetherness, of a kind Short stories Journeys Stories of a lonely heart Saga of wound Here Punctuation marks Her, his and theirs – a 3 by 5 triptych on words. These poems, as the subtitle of the book explains are poems on that emotion that grips most of us, has us wondering , spending sleepless nights up for..love and its myriad shades. I'd recommend it to anyone in love, anyone who has ever been in love and anyone who is a hopeless romantic:)

S Mari was my colleague at ITC, Expressions greeting cards, where I worked   for 5 months, at the start of my career as a trainee copywriter. She is the author of ‘Between Filter Coffee and Cappucino: The story of a confused Indian.’ She is on my Facebook list, and I saw her Facebook update saying she had come out with a book, so I was quick to go to Amazon and download it with my Kindle Unlimited Subscription, where the book is available for free. It is being sold for Rs. 250 on Kindle, otherwise. The book traces the journey of a simple homemaker Nandini, who is your typical traditional South Indian ‘filter kaapi’ drinking, ‘all-heart desi mom’ who moves to the US of A with her husband and child to work there and adapts to the cultural changes, which involve more than just the cappuccino and isolation. How she wins over her colleagues and decides home is where the heart is, forms the crux of this short tale, which has a lot of soul, to make up for its hasty writing and s...

I did a quiz this morning on which book I should read based on the 90s movie that I loved of the ones given.   So mine was 'Bridget Jones' Diary and the corresponding suggestion was 'Sofia Khan is not obliged by Ayisha Malik. I' 've downloaded a sample and will get to it once I'm done with my long list of books from juggernaut. In fact, I've got ' I'm big, so what' to read by Shuchi Singh Kalra and the Rekha book, which is partially read. I made some progress with the Rekha book today. But she seems to have rubbed all her boyfriends' mothers' the wrong way with her unconventional ways and with her illegitimate roots over which she, of course, had no control. It's quite a depressing story actually because when you see her go against society and not get accepted by society in India you just wonder if she should have been living in a country abroad where she might have found happiness. All she seems to have faced here is double stan...

The juggernaut.in sale is on and I've picked up Rekha - the untold story by Yasser Usman, Asura- Tale of the vanquished, The Caravan collection - the big book on Bollywood, Southern Spice, Lights, Camera, Melodrama, Once upon a crush by Kiran Manral, A sweet deal by Andaleeb Wajid, and Ludhiana to London by Vibha Batra. Started reading 'Rekha- the untold story' . Just finished reading about her marriage to Mukesh Agarwal, a businessman who was besotted with her but who was previously involved with someone else and hid it from her. He was also on medication and depressed. He ended up committing suicide and she was blamed for it, being called a black widow and worse by some of her contemporaries. The next chapter talks about her childhood when her mom was 'the other woman' of two men, one of them being Rekha's biological father, Gemini Ganesh. I've just finished 11% of the book but I'll come back to it and finish it to blog my thoughts about the re...

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...

'A little journey' by Ray Bradbury is a 9-minute read on the Juggernaut app and is available there for free. It is a classic short story about a bunch of old women who are 'invited' to go to a relaxing spa in Mars. Mrs Bellowes is one among these women who is lured into going since she wants to meet the Maker, but how does this journey turn out exactly? For that, read the story on the app . When I read this story, I was reminded of a competition I took part in middle school. A few of us were chosen to take part in a contest that talked about life on Mars. I got through stage one of the competition. But stage two, I think, involved writing a story about life on Mars and going to Bangalore to attend the finals or some such thing. My dad had bought a book on Mars to help me with some of the background research. Then again, when I was a freelance journalist in '99, I remember interviewing a Chennai boy in school who had been invited by NASA for a tour of their prem...