Variety is the spice of life

Since there aren't any kids of his age in our apartment me and junior are our playmates. Be it board games or any other games, more often than not we are the partners and competitors. Instead of just forming the regular rules, i often try to make it "funny" (also read as antics that will make wifey mad with rage). Since junior is keen to study about geography (guess it comes with this age) we will play mock quiz with each other on countries/capitals, sobriquets and whatever little else i played with my friends during school days. Wifey likes abbreviations and remembering their full forms. Apparently, one day she was asking for the expansion of DRDO for which junior has responded "Dr.Dolittle"!!! Sathiyama idhu naan solli tharala. But the moment he started laughing at his own version of the full form, wifey turned beet red in color and started scolding (not him...but me). She started complaining that junior is not taking anything serious and is always trying to m...

 Ever since i started watching the third season of the Lincoln Lawyer, have wanted to read the novels by Michael Connelly, who is the creator of the series. The best part about the series being, not just the legal aspects which are demonstrated in a simplistic manner, but the cleverness behind those arguments and the situations that are setup for those deliberations. Even though the lead character is defence counsel, the author doesn't show any undue bias towards the defence (obviously there has to be some tilt for the hero has to win in the end), but he presents both the sides with good points. The reason for picking this one up, after watching 3 seasons of the show being the cliffhanger ending, where Mick Haller (the lawyer who roams around in his Lincoln car and hence the tag) is arrested by a traffic cop, who also identifies a blood soaked body cramped in the trunk of his car. This book, begins to describe the "what happened next" portions of the story. The story begi...

 If i've to start this post as fast as how this series goes, then the first line would be the closing sentence!! Despite each episode running close to 45 mins, this is one of the fastest series i've binge watched ever!! The after effects of the series is more like aftermath of Deepavali. A day early, you would've had the rush of crackers bursting, fire and sound and lights and smoke and high on energy. The next day is more of a revelation with all those dusts and burnt papers flowing around the streets in waves, making you wonder are these the very things that were fun yesterday!! Like any racy book or movie or any ride in amusement park for that matter, the success of them all lies in not making the audience to think while the performance is on. When asked for the feedback, while still in the adrenaline rush, inevitably, every one will gush good about the same. But when they take a breath and start to recollect, they may wonder, what was all that fuss about!!This series is...

I've mentioned about "Chai with Chitra" youtube interview show, conducted by Chitra lakshmanan, a few times in this space. During early days of Covid, i had started watching his interviews, which were predominantly with movie people, from yesteryears and some recent as well. The specialty of the show being, the openness with which people spoke and how he made them felt at ease. His memory power is something phenomenal and even when the guest struggles a bit to recollect the names he would immediately step in with that data. Probably the fact that the interviewer knows everything about what they were kind of disarmed the guests that they can't brow beat this guy or bluff to his face!! Almost all of those interviews will have a standard template - the guest will start with their intro and how they came into movies. Depending on their age, Chitra will ask them about their interactions with Sivaji/MGR, Rajini/Kamal, Vijay/Ajith and also about the famous directors at that ...

 It has been a really long while we saw a movie together as a family. Ever since Meiyazhagan got released in OTT, i've been asking my mom to watch it for it is based on her native places and she would enjoy hearing about them on screen. We finally managed to make her sit for the movie and she watched few portions of it. She was happy to hear about her native village being mentioned and the conductor listing out nearby places as well where the bus will stop made her mention few titbits about those places. There is a scene where Rajkiran (who plays uncle to Arvindswamy) hugs him and cries, wishing that he would visit them more often. It made us all realize how my mom's dad, used to hug us whenever we visited him and how he would cry to my mom, asking her to visit him soon the next time. He was over 80 at that time and was almost deaf. I remember playing with his hearing aid, not knowing how it works. His vision was also very blurry and he used to spend most of his day time, sitti...