Variety is the spice of life

As people are slowly learning to live with Covid, with initial levels of carefulness leading into the usual carelessness, there are scenes that emerge akin to those at disaster struck areas, post the dust settling down. Only difference here being, the locked down public, have decided to roll the dice of fate on their own out of boredom and are gambling with their lives, literally and figuratively. But it has always been a “Sophie’s choice” of life over livelihood. There were voices of GDP getting wiped out, economy in shambles, industrial sectors under irrevocable damage etc during the peak news coverage of pandemic. Now that the death and infection due to the disease, has become a mere statistic, relegated to a single slide of metrics, with mystery death of an up and coming actor taking up primetime coverage, the actual impact to the society, both financially and emotionally is slowly getting unraveled. Lucky for the present government, they don’t have an election to face at least...

What more can I say about this lady, whose every book makes me go WOW in amazement. So many different and more importantly original plot ideas, so many clues and event sequences conjured in that wickedly intelligent brain, so many villains with their devious ways of making a kill and every one of them equally or even better than the other. In this novel, as literally as the title goes, a murder is not just announced, but is advertised on a newspaper. Even though the premise and setup sounds ridiculously illogical, the master that she is, makes it as close to believable as possible. It is one of the slowest paced novel of her that I’ve read till now and really stretches your patience till Miss Marple makes an entry as late as 70 pages into the 250 pager. There are a curious bunch of villagers who gather at the house where the murder is supposed to happen, assuming it to be some public show. Dot on time as marked, the mystery guy does make an appearance and power goes out. Shots are hear...

 As with the first book, this one also is being read in bits and pieces and i am relishing every single chapter of it. One alarming thing that i noticed was, when i started reading this book, Covid was raising its head and soon hit a peak that was not even imagined by anyone. The previous book had talked about great diseases like plague and global level catastrophes in the form of war and famine. It was almost as if the virus was thumbing its nose at us and our present way of living. The more i started reading the second book, the more it made me realize, how true the concepts mentioned in the book were as compared to real life!!! It is a morbid comparison, but if one could compare the number of lives lost due to malaria, typhoid, water borne diseases, malnutrition as against the present pandemic, it definitely makes one wonder, why they were never dealt with such seriousness? Even now, the media covers Americas, Asia, Europe and the Australian continents. There is one major a...

At times, the universe sends you responses and replies across unforeseen mediums. With this covid adding to already depressing scenarios, getting addicted to mobile phone has only added to insomnia. My sleeping cycle entirely went for a toss and I was having trouble sleeping before 4AM. It further added to the mood and was thoughts were going on a downward spiral. Was getting irritated with everything and one night, unable to sleep, was wondering about how things would’ve been different for a “had it been” scenario. I never realized when I slept and next day stumbled on this tamil movie, “Oh my kadavulay”. Curiously, my friend had given me this movie long time back, recommending it as a decent watch and I had misplaced it. While browsing through some OTT landed on this one. To my surprise, the story was very similar to what I was thinking the previous night. The hero gets into a situation and wonders out loud to God himself, who gives him a ticket to try the road not taken. Evident...

 Another amazing movie recommendation from a friend of mine. I had watched this movie trailer couple of times and had given it a pass previously. Wasn’t sure how “James Bond” Daniel Craig would fit in role of a regular detective. After I saw the post that it was Agatha Christie meet Stephen king, was more than intrigued. As luck would’ve it, the movie was removed from the OTT I had subscribed for and after a hunt finally managed to catch hold of it. It not only has James Bond but also “Captain America” Chris Evans in it. Usually, people who get stereotyped into playing superheroes across couple of movies, find it hard to gel with regular characters shrugging off their much celebrated roles. With Avengers and Marvel universe movies running into dozens, any actor who had been part of those franchise have more or less settled for their career I guess. Both financially and variant role wise. It is very difficult to relate them to regular characters as well. Ditto goes for James Bond ro...

 Off late I’ve been watching way too many movies across multiple languages. Almost a couple of them a day. The biggest plus of OTT being, getting to watch other language movies that I would’nt have ever tried before. Have been hearing about this movie for a while and with Vijay Devarakonda’s career hitting all time high with his recent releases and this one having already won national awards, wanted to check it, but was awaiting a version with sub titles. Finally managed to land upon one and boy, was it a sweet surprise.  The movie was fresh from first reel itself and even though I couldn’t put a finger on it, there was something refreshing and relatable about it from the very beginning. The ease with which the character introduction happens and the setting is established, shows the knack of the director and wiki told that he was already a past master in making short films. It was evident with the speed with which he introduces the story along with the characters and on the mi...