Gone Girl - Gillian Flynn (Spoiler Alert!)

This novel is a must-read, sort of those 101 guides - if your husband is having an affair and you want to teach him a lesson or you want to protect yourself from your psycho wife. Since I do not fall into either category, it ended up giving me a very bad case of splitting headache which refused to go away even after turning the last page. :-(

As far as the plot goes, we have a couple - Nick and Amy. As is the norm in these novels, Amy is very pretty and Nick is handsome in a roguish way. They lose their jobs in New York and move back to his native town, supposedly to take care of his dying mother. There is Go (for Margo!), Nick's sister who is helping him run the bar purchased with Amy's money (Ouch!). And then there are Amy's parents, the psychologists and authors of the successful book series 'Amazing Amy'. Then one fine day, Amy disappears. The house is a mess - suggesting she might have been kidnapped. And yet, there is no ransom note. So the needle of suspicion points to Nick, he being the husband. Innocent till proven guilty? No chance. It is upto him to prove that he didn't do it - unless the Gone Girl (or her body!) is found.

The author has done a very good job of making the reader suspect that Nick is the culprit - so much so that the reader starts wondering if Nick is innocent after all. Amy's schemes appear clever but they are so elaborate that at many points during the narrative I paused and wondered aka Dean Winchester from Supernatural - Seriously? Of course, I also couldn't stomach the fact that in the end Nick cannot bring Amy to justice. :-( The book jacket mentioned that there are talks to turn this novel into a motion picture. I am curious to see who are cast as Nick and Amy but don't think I will shell out any money to go watch it in the theaters.

I have had enough of Amy and her scheming ways.

Happy Republic Day India!

I would have been surprised if I hadn't woken up to the cacophony of patriotic songs from old Hindi movies being blared from multiple loudspeakers today morning. But 70 years down the lane my compatriots don't seem to have lost their penchant for this. All the usual suspects have been played as I write this - ऐ मेरे वतन के लोगो, कर चले हम फिदा, वंदे मातरम (from movie आनंद मठ), मेरा रंग दे बसंती चोला (this one seems to have multiple versions), है प्रीत जहा की रीत सदा, संदेसे आते है and मेरे देश की धरती. दुल्हन चली and जहा डाल डाल पर सोनेकी चिडिया are yet to make an appearance but I am confident that they will, sooner rather than later. :-)

Well, all is not well in the Republic of India - we are fighting in the name of language, caste, creed, religion and seem to be discovering more and more differences over which we can kill each other. The farmers are committing suicide. The environment is being destroyed. Women are facing discrimination and violence. More laws are being broken than followed. Every year I wonder how this country - of different cultures, languages, castes and religions - is being held together and every year I fear that we will eventually fall apart.

But we haven't, at least, till now. There is news - never front page (encouraging news rarely makes it there, today's journalism being what it is!) - of people going beyond these differences to help each other out, of honest people returning valuable things to their rightful owners, of people doing what they can to protect the environment, of people losing their lives while trying to save others' and of people doing their bit to make sure that this country gets better every day.

We can follow their lead without having to go out of our way or causing a great inconvenience to ourselves. We simply have to decide to do one thing from here on. It could be to follow traffic rules - not to start driving till the signal turns green (no matter how much others honk!) and not to start crossing the road on foot if the pedestrian walking sign is off. It could be to donate to a good charity working on a cause dear to our heart - amount does not matter, desire does. It could be to save water - saying no when the server brings water as soon as we are seated in the restaurants (if you don't intend to drink it) or refills it later. To not forward hateful messages on whatsapp or any other social media. None of these are really difficult, are they? And certainly more effective than playing the same patriotic songs every year (and polluting the environment in the process!).

We have to remember that our Constitution gave us rights but we also have responsibilities. Oh, and in case you are wondering, my resolution for this year is to fill up the form for organ donation. :-)

I happened to watch a scene from the movie 'Legion' yesterday. God has lost all faith in humanity and sends an army of angels to destroy it. And yet there is one angel who stands shoulder to shoulder with humans to defend them. When the protagonist, Jeep, asks him how he managed to keep his faith, the angel replies that it is because of people like him that he knows that there is hope yet for humanity. It is worth fighting for.

Let's give that angel more reasons to fight for us now, shall we? :-)

पानीसे तस्वीर कहा बनती है, ख्वाबोंसे तकदीर कहा बनती है
किसीभी रिश्तेको सच्चे दिलसे निभाओ, ये जिंदगी फिर वापस कहा मिलती है
कौन किससे चाहकर दूर होता है, हर कोई अपने हालातोंसे मजबूर होता है
हम तो बस इतना जानते है, हर रिश्ता 'मोती' और हर दोस्त 'कोहिनूर' होता है

- Who else can it be but the Great Gulzar :-)

Blowing Up Russia - Alexander Litvinenko and Yuri Felshtinsky

A Small Corner Of Hell, Dispatch from Chechenya -  Anna Politkovskaya

Putin's Russia - Anna Politkovskaya

The Age Of Assasins - The Rise And Rise Of Vladimir Putin - How Scary Are Russia's New Rulers  - Yuri Felshtinsky

Mahalakshmi Saras 2016

Where: Bandra Reclamation
When: 16-28 January
Timings: 10am-10pm

कल ख़ुशी मिली थी
जल्दीमें थी रुकी नहीं

Trust Gulzar to know the state of our minds :-)

There is no telling what might pop out of an old attic. When we cleaned up an old storage space at my mom's place recently, three items - which I had not seen for years - popped out.

One, a puppet of a man - even as children we had not been able to describe it more than this. It is a dusky (read black!) man, wearing a headgear, a short green pant and a pair of over-sized shoes - way too oversize for his thin reedy legs. Dad had brought him back from his office trip to Germany - why I have no idea. Back then, I used to find the puppet exceedingly creepy and still do. But surprisingly, when he was recently unearthed from the dusty, cobwebby confines of the storage and mom declared her intention of throwing him out along with other junk items, my brother (to whom I had sent his photo on whats-app with caption 'Guess what we found') and I put up a stiff resistance. It is one of those items from a shared childhood that we can collectively laugh over as we pick it up and look at it. The puppet stays.

The second item shares this trait with the puppet. It is a pressure cooker from the toy cooking set I used to play with as a child. There used to be a stovetop along with it - which was way too over-sized for the cooker to fit onto it. But that must have been thrown out. When I sent this photo to my brother on whatsapp, I got a big smiley along with the message 'you used to cook imaginary food in this and ask me to eat it'. That part is true. Him and the younger brother of my friend next door were made to eat imaginary food from little plates as we both girls did our make-believe cooking. :-) Needless to say, the pressure cooker is staying as well.

The last item is of a more recent vintage than the two items mentioned earlier. It is from the days when the SSC exam was given a lot of importance. They used to have special magazines dedicated to the exam study like e.g. दहावी दिवाळी. The said item is an issue of the said magazine - it contains a history paper solved by me, in my handwriting. It shocked me a little, to see that I could write so much in one sitting once upon a time, and that too in such legible nice way. Now, my handwriting starts turning illegible halfway through taking down a recipe while watching a show. I neglected to maintain it - it is that plain and simple. Sad, but true.

Maybe I should start writing one paragraph in Devnagari every Saturday morning, the way they used to make us do in the school :-)