Ash Talks Books

I picked up this book from the Juggernaut app a few months back during a sale after I found out that it was a book of short stories. Else, the title 'The Legend of Lakshmi Prasad' and the sample I downloaded didn't exactly entice me. I was also curious about Twinkle Khanna's second book. The book consists of four short stories: The Legend of Lakshmi Prasad Salaam, Noni Appa If the Weather Permits The Sanitary Man from a Sacred Land The first story was very much like what the PM would tweet out on women's day. Not to say it wasn't inspiring, but I felt it was a bit too goody-goody. 'Salaam, Noni Appa' was interesting and I truly liked the story, except for the name of the lead character, which sounded odd to my ears. 'If the weather permits' was written tongue-in-cheek and in my opinion simply brilliant. It is the hidden gem in this collection, but not everyone seems to like it. In the review section, people are seen criticisi...

My purchases during the Freedom Sale on the Juggernaut app include:  'Equal Halves' - Famous Indian Wives edited by Annie Zaidi 'Amma'- Jayalalithaa's Journey from Movie Star to Political Queen by Vaasanthi and 'Indira'- India's Most Powerful Prime Minister by Sagarika Ghose A couple of days before the sale, I'd bought: The Diary of Rehan Malhotra by Hirsh Sawnhey All these have been added to my TBR pile. The only problem is they can't be read on the Kindle, so it's kind of hard on the eyes!

I think it was just a matter of time that I got hooked on to mythology. It was inevitable. I say this because a childhood friend, SVS, was asking me which version of the Ramayana and Mahabharata her teen daughter would enjoy. I'd suggested Ashok Banker's but then another friend interjected saying it might be too racy for her. The first seed was planted in my subconscious. And then one of the reputed neurologists I visited for my frozen shoulder/cervical radiculosis/whatever-the-heck-still undiagnosed-disease-it-is, spent a good 40 minutes of his precious time discussing spiritual questions with me. Don't ask me why. I'm as stumped as you are. So again the leaning toward knowing more about Gods and Goddesses. My extended family meet consisted of discussions of spirituality by all the elders. My lack of knowledge of such matters is rather shocking. And then the online book group that I'm a part of - Senior Reading Raccoons - had suggested, among many books, L...

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...