Variety is the spice of life

Finally managed to finish the movie, almost one month after I started watching. There has been so many reviews and research around the movie content. Ithaan un takka nu laam kekkapadaathu. It was a 3 hour long movie and first 40 minutes one sittingla got over. Adutha 2 plus hours paakrathukulla porumaiye poidchi. Evlo thaan forward pananlum kathai nagaravay illa. Ellarum ulaga padam Oscar range ambassador car range nu pugaznthu thallings about the movie. Honestly, I guess, even the double positive of the movie would’ve been negative. Avlo dark. Neo noire, chaaya kadai nair nu laam solitu kodi pudichitu vantha uruttu kattaiyaal adi kudukkapadum. Some reviews had mentioned it as dark comedy!!! Idhelaam comedyaada dei. Unga humour sensela theeya vaikka. Naalu kadhai. Short stories may be. Adha onna oru andaaala kotti, kindi, kadhaiyaaka try panirukanga. Each one dealing with several of the seven deadly sins and how acceptable they are or they’ve become in our society. Adultery panra wife...

As mentioned before, amazed as I am with the kind of videos picked by Junior, it is fast approaching alarm point of addiction. Luckily he has turned his attention to story books now and should hopefully develop on it. A while back, he was uttering all in comprehensible gibberish, in the tune of the alphabets song. We were worried to the extent that he may even forget the original English alphabets for he even started quoting some random gibberish as words. One day when I was feeding him lunch, while he was watching video, I thought the song sounded similar. Then only we realized that, the gibberish was actually Russian!!! He had been quoting Russian alphabets and words related to those all the while!!! The other song he had been humming all along had been a Chinese one. I was amazed with the ease with which kids pick up language skills, which at the moment, be it their mother tongue or any other language, is as alien. His sentences in tamil are mere repeats of what we talk in the house...

The gang of Dholakpur has well and truly invaded our space. Junior is so much smitten by Chota Bheem that, he refuses to wear shirt after having food and insists on wearing full trousers ala his favorite superhero. For a person who has seldom tasted any form of sweet, he would mimic chota Bheem’s action of eating laddu with both hands, do a fist pump like him and proclaim that he has become strong (“naan chota bheem aatam strong aaiten). Then begins the actual role play. Everyone else, except his mom, becomes Rakshasaas. He would ask us to “fight” with him and even otherwise, he would declare war on the “rakshasaas” and would begin punching with full vigour. The cartoon has various forms of Bheem aligning with little Krishna, Ganapati to fight super villains and also there is a full-fledged Bheemayanam, where the Dholakpur fellows enact Ramayanam. Junior is so impressed by Bheem that anything and everything he imitates that character. In Youtube, there are songs for each of the charact...

If at all there are two story tellers who are poles apart in their trade, Keigo Higashino and Peter Swanson would form the extremities of storytelling. Of course, some may argue that they fall under different genres. But both of them deal with murders and police investigations in their own way. While Higashino’s approach is more methodical and minute to the point of being real, covering the investigative angle, Swanson delves into the darkest corner of the suspect and at times the victim’s psyche, touching upon the greyness of the surrounding characters as well. If at all you can think of a color tone, it would be all shades of black for his stories. In this book, Swanson, hits the ground running with the assumption that, even though only 4 books old, his readers would be accustomed to his way of storytelling. The story begins with a couple, having moved into a new locality, gets invited to their neighbor’s house for dinner. The entire story is setup around the 2 couples with a d...