Vaibhav Anand's Blog, page 7
August 20, 2016
Book Review: Harry Potter and the Cursed Child by J.K. Rowling, John Tiffany, Jack Thorne
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With the Cursed Child, J. K. Rowling has effectively destroyed the charm of a Harry Potter book. True, the fact that it is a play vs a novel does take away from the book. But even as a novel, it is clear to see that the book would have been half as interesting as the worst Harry Potter book. With lazy plotting, characterization, narrative flow, it is plain to see Rowling has descended to Chetan Bhagat's level.
The feeling I was left with at the end of the book was disgust at having enriched the already mega-rich Rowling again. The book did have its (rare) moments but for the most part, it is everything you do not expect a Harry Potter book to be.
The feeling I was left with at the end of the book was disgust at having enriched the already mega-rich Rowling again. The book did have its (rare) moments but for the most part, it is everything you do not expect a Harry Potter book to be.
August 5, 2016
Book Review: The Men Who Killed Gandhi by Manohar Malgonkar
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Buried deep in Indian history is a story that is rarely told... well, rarely told properly. Manohar Malgonkar's meticulously researched "The Men Who Killed Gandhi" is a biography of the consortium of men that claimed Gandhi's life and is thus, one of the key missing bridges in India's history.
If you read school (or perhaps even college?) history textbooks alone, where Gandhi's assassination is passed off as a simple statement, you would believe Godse and his fellows to be a band of maniacs. Or alternately, to believe that Gandhi died simply because he was killed by Godse. Reading the book just makes you wonder just how many more such incredible stories are our history textbooks hiding.
The book reads like a taut thriller but what floored me about the book were the photographs of the men, the places in the story, the receipts of train and air tickets (costing all of hundred rupees from one end of the country to the other!), the police records, etc.
Highly recommended.
Buried deep in Indian history is a story that is rarely told... well, rarely told properly. Manohar Malgonkar's meticulously researched "The Men Who Killed Gandhi" is a biography of the consortium of men that claimed Gandhi's life and is thus, one of the key missing bridges in India's history.
If you read school (or perhaps even college?) history textbooks alone, where Gandhi's assassination is passed off as a simple statement, you would believe Godse and his fellows to be a band of maniacs. Or alternately, to believe that Gandhi died simply because he was killed by Godse. Reading the book just makes you wonder just how many more such incredible stories are our history textbooks hiding.
The book reads like a taut thriller but what floored me about the book were the photographs of the men, the places in the story, the receipts of train and air tickets (costing all of hundred rupees from one end of the country to the other!), the police records, etc.
Highly recommended.
August 1, 2016
June 16, 2016
Pahlaj Nihalani to censor his own name; to now be called ‘Pa Ni’
Satire...
Mumbai: Reports coming out Mumbai suggest that Pahlaj Nihalani, India’s Censor Board Chief, has decided to censor his own name. Apparently, Mr. Nihalani was so frustrated after the Mumbai High Court cleared ‘Udta Punjab’ with just one cut out of the 94 suggested by the Censor Board, that he decided to go to CBFC Headquarters and issue a notification regarding censorship of his own name.
While this Faking News reporter could not get in touch with Mr. Nihalani, he managed to get in touch with Tadapit Marathe – Mr. Nihalani’s PA (Personal Assistant). “Yes it is true,” Tadapit said, speaking over phone. “Pahlaj bhau has censored his own name. According to him, his old name was not according to guidelines. Bhau has said that with his new name, he will now be as pavitra as ‘paanee’.”
Meanwhile, Anurag Kashyap reportedly called Mr. Nihalani nee Mr. Ni to thank him for providing free publicity to ‘Udta Punjab’ as also to congratulate him on his new name.
Mumbai: Reports coming out Mumbai suggest that Pahlaj Nihalani, India’s Censor Board Chief, has decided to censor his own name. Apparently, Mr. Nihalani was so frustrated after the Mumbai High Court cleared ‘Udta Punjab’ with just one cut out of the 94 suggested by the Censor Board, that he decided to go to CBFC Headquarters and issue a notification regarding censorship of his own name.
While this Faking News reporter could not get in touch with Mr. Nihalani, he managed to get in touch with Tadapit Marathe – Mr. Nihalani’s PA (Personal Assistant). “Yes it is true,” Tadapit said, speaking over phone. “Pahlaj bhau has censored his own name. According to him, his old name was not according to guidelines. Bhau has said that with his new name, he will now be as pavitra as ‘paanee’.”Meanwhile, Anurag Kashyap reportedly called Mr. Nihalani nee Mr. Ni to thank him for providing free publicity to ‘Udta Punjab’ as also to congratulate him on his new name.
June 11, 2016
Pahlaj Nihalani goes bald after asking his barber for too many cuts
Couldn't resist. Satire.
Mumbai: In breaking news today, Censor Board Chief, Pahlaj ‘Sankaari’ Nihalani went bald after a haircut in which he kept asking his barber to make more cuts. The haircut reportedly occurred around 8 PM yesterday in a hair salon near the Bandra society where Mr. Nihalani lives.
Talking about the incident, Tadapit Munde – Mr. Nihalani’s barber for the day – said, “I do not know what Nihalani bhau wanted. He kept asking me to ‘cut more’ whenever I would finish the haircut. Ultimately I picked up a shear and shaved him bald. It was only then did he stop asking me to ‘cut more’ of his hair. Ganja hee karna tha to pehle bol dete… itna time khasti nahin karta.”
“I asked him several times if I should stop but he kept saying ‘aur kato, sab as per guidelines hona chahiye‘. What could I do?” questioned the barber.
Mr. Nihalani was seen greeting people at his residence, claiming that his new look was even more ‘sanskaari’ than before. Filmmakers meanwhile wondered if having taken out his “censorship tendencies” on his hair, Mr. Nihalani would advise lesser cuts for movies.
http://www.fakingnews.firstpost.com/2016/06/pahlaj-nihalani-goes-bald-after-asking-his-barber-for-too-many-cuts/
Mumbai: In breaking news today, Censor Board Chief, Pahlaj ‘Sankaari’ Nihalani went bald after a haircut in which he kept asking his barber to make more cuts. The haircut reportedly occurred around 8 PM yesterday in a hair salon near the Bandra society where Mr. Nihalani lives.
Talking about the incident, Tadapit Munde – Mr. Nihalani’s barber for the day – said, “I do not know what Nihalani bhau wanted. He kept asking me to ‘cut more’ whenever I would finish the haircut. Ultimately I picked up a shear and shaved him bald. It was only then did he stop asking me to ‘cut more’ of his hair. Ganja hee karna tha to pehle bol dete… itna time khasti nahin karta.”“I asked him several times if I should stop but he kept saying ‘aur kato, sab as per guidelines hona chahiye‘. What could I do?” questioned the barber.
Mr. Nihalani was seen greeting people at his residence, claiming that his new look was even more ‘sanskaari’ than before. Filmmakers meanwhile wondered if having taken out his “censorship tendencies” on his hair, Mr. Nihalani would advise lesser cuts for movies.
http://www.fakingnews.firstpost.com/2016/06/pahlaj-nihalani-goes-bald-after-asking-his-barber-for-too-many-cuts/
June 7, 2016
Book Review: The Meadow by Adrian Levy, Cathy Scott-Clark
I chanced upon Levy and Scott-Clarke's book 'The Siege' - a fantastic non-fiction thriller about the 26/11 Mumbai terror invasion - which led me to explore the author duo's other works. Though 'Deception' seemed a juicier story, I was forced to pick up 'The Meadow' since 'Deception' was not available in India (Aargh!). And boy, did the duo not disappoint again! 'The Meadow' is a fantastic fly-on-the-wall non-fiction account of the 1995 kidnapping of six foreign tourists in Kashmir. Levy and Scott-Clarke patiently take the reader through all the players of the Game - Masood Azhar (and his father), Kashmir homegrown militants (such as Sikander), the Pakistani ISI and a myriad of Indian agencies right from the state police to RAW.
The book starts off slow as it takes you through the lives of the foreigners, before it all began. Give it time, though. The authors' investigation(s) eventually reveals a bombshell you will not expect.
Some day someone (hopefully the authors of this book) will write a complete book on Azhar - he is after all more adept at protecting his hide than Osama ever was, in addition to being arguably as adept at terrorism (his fingerprints are on the India Parliament attack, 26/11, Daniel Pearl beheading, London 7/7, etc.) Till then, 'The Meadow' is 'Masood Azhar: Origins' as much as it is the story of a kidnapping gone wrong.
May 21, 2016
Book Review: Half a Rupee Stories by Gulzar
I picked up this book with a lot of enthusiasm; to a large extent I had hoped for Gulzar to be as entertaining in translation as Sadat Hasan Manto. However, but for the very first story and maybe a couple of silver linings, 'Half a Rupee Stories' is boring, pointless and doesn't even have the lyrical or poetic magic you would expect a Gulzar book to contain. It took me three months to trudge through this not very thick book, and it was a terrible let down.
Avoid.
April 22, 2016
The Great War Of Hind: On Deal Today!
Available for Rs. 99 (56% Off) with free delivery for the next few hours: http://amzn.to/1prsK5e
An interview with e-Books India (Transcript)
Please tell us about you. Where are you from? What is your professional background and how did you become an author?I am an MBA from FMS, Delhi and an engineer from Delhi College of Engineering. I have actually held a day job for the last six years since I graduated from FMS. I wrote my first book in the second year of B-School: the intention was to tell the B-School story no one was talking about – the unglamorous murky truth of how the premier league MBA ecosystem in India almost collapsed when the 2008 global recession hit. And well, I had always wanted to write ever since I read my first Famous Five book what seems like aeons ago.
To a lot of authors, the dream is to write a bestseller and retire. While I had flirted with the thought initially when my first book came out six years ago, I eventually realized that a classical author’s job is lonely, depressing and dark. You basically sit in a room waiting in despair for the right idea, the right words, and the right characters to come to you. I doubt I will ever be a full time author – as it is, I can hardly write when I am at peace or with time on my hands. The best ideas always come to me when I am pressed for time; it is the constant grind of life that makes me an author, for the most part.
What types of books do you write?It often takes a very different technique to write different kinds of books – which is why most science fiction writers only write science fiction, comedy writers only write comedy, mystery/thriller writers only write mystery/thrillers and so on; for the most part anyway. I grew up on a diet of all kinds of books, all of which I secretly wished I had written – and what I have discovered overall about myself is that I tend to be fairly ambidextrous when it comes to writing. I just need to train for a particular style if required. Training takes months but primarily involves reading the masters of that genre and noting their techniques. You learn a lot from masterpieces but you learn more from bad books from the masters of a particular genre. For example, one of the books in the Harry Potter series (the 4th book if my memory serves me right) or Douglas Adam’s Dirk Gently series are both written by masters but have significant flaws compared to the authors’ earlier works. For an author like me, it is absolute gold to read mediocre to bad books by great authors… it’s like seeing an elaborately constructed building with the foundations and the wiring showing; it just makes understanding how to write the genre much easier.
My natural voice is cynical, which is where the first book ‘If God Went to B School’ fit in. Over time as I started reading satirical articles on Faking News a few years back, I discovered that I could easily slip into satire writing (which led to my 300+ posts for Faking News so far). But reading the novelized history of the Mughals (by the husband-wife duo going by the pseudonym ‘Alex Rutherford’) made me realize I wanted to write historical fiction. I enjoyed the books so much that I wanted to write that genre! Which is how ‘The Great War of Hind’ was born.I remain perennially besotted with sci-fi comedy too; inevitably, I will write a book or a series in this genre. Maybe a few years down the line.
Can you please tell us a bit about your most recent book entitled The Great War of Hind, its overall plot and the key characters in it?The overall idea of the book is around how we believe epics written by Valmiki and Ved Vyas to be about Gods and real men. To me, Valmiki and Ved Vyas were the Stan Lee’s of their generation, who wrote these stories to regale people. In parallel, I had been toying with a simple logical idea of creation – God creating man and animals – and I saw no better way to tell the story than to pick mythological characters everyone knows and plug them into a story of the origin of mankind and animal-kind and how and why it all happened, and what happened after. ‘The Great War of Hind’ and ‘The Legend of Ramm’ series are built around this kernel.
Are you working on any other book(s)? If so, can you please tell us what we can expect to see from you in the future?Well, I am sort of obligated to finish this series (Legend of Ramm) now that I have started it. So that will be a couple of years of my life at least. Unless something else catches my fancy next, I should write the sci-fi comedy I have been hungering to write for a long time after that.
Can you please tell us about your approach to writing? For example, do you follow structures and writing rules? Or do you write in a free flow way? Do you have any particular time of the day you like to write? Or any specific environment you prefer to sit down and write?A significant amount of time for me goes in establishing the skeletal structure of the plot first. This takes a month or more (sometimes much more). Writing for me is about threading the needles I have laid down, as the plot. But it does get complicated at times. You might have a great idea while writing that completely muddles up the plot, or find it impossible to write to stick to the plot structure. So it is a tedious bone-crunching process.
I write best when I am constrained for time, when I am tired and stressed. There is no particular time for me – I just try and get in a little bit of writing everyday.
From your experiences, could you please share 2-3 top tips to help beginner authors who want to publish a novel?Read, read every day. And read the classics first to get a grounding in the language. You’ll get nowhere by reading the complete works of Chetan Bhagat.
Write a lot. Write your own blogs or for blogger networks. Keep that animal in you alive.
Be meticulous. A comma in the wrong place on one page can shave a point off book reviews. Every brick is important; every speck of cement is important in what you are building.
It’s quite another thing to sell a book in India though but in the long run, good writing, strong plot structure trumps short term gimmicks. Not everything you write will be a blockbuster hit, even if you get a selfie with some minor celebrity holding up your book.
How can people find out more about you?I tweet from @vaibrainmaker. I collate my satirical articles, book reviews and other random thoughts on the universe on my blog. My three books are on Amazon here: http://amzn.to/1YAvSYy
Over the next few years, the number of books will hopefully go up. God willing.
To a lot of authors, the dream is to write a bestseller and retire. While I had flirted with the thought initially when my first book came out six years ago, I eventually realized that a classical author’s job is lonely, depressing and dark. You basically sit in a room waiting in despair for the right idea, the right words, and the right characters to come to you. I doubt I will ever be a full time author – as it is, I can hardly write when I am at peace or with time on my hands. The best ideas always come to me when I am pressed for time; it is the constant grind of life that makes me an author, for the most part.
What types of books do you write?It often takes a very different technique to write different kinds of books – which is why most science fiction writers only write science fiction, comedy writers only write comedy, mystery/thriller writers only write mystery/thrillers and so on; for the most part anyway. I grew up on a diet of all kinds of books, all of which I secretly wished I had written – and what I have discovered overall about myself is that I tend to be fairly ambidextrous when it comes to writing. I just need to train for a particular style if required. Training takes months but primarily involves reading the masters of that genre and noting their techniques. You learn a lot from masterpieces but you learn more from bad books from the masters of a particular genre. For example, one of the books in the Harry Potter series (the 4th book if my memory serves me right) or Douglas Adam’s Dirk Gently series are both written by masters but have significant flaws compared to the authors’ earlier works. For an author like me, it is absolute gold to read mediocre to bad books by great authors… it’s like seeing an elaborately constructed building with the foundations and the wiring showing; it just makes understanding how to write the genre much easier.
My natural voice is cynical, which is where the first book ‘If God Went to B School’ fit in. Over time as I started reading satirical articles on Faking News a few years back, I discovered that I could easily slip into satire writing (which led to my 300+ posts for Faking News so far). But reading the novelized history of the Mughals (by the husband-wife duo going by the pseudonym ‘Alex Rutherford’) made me realize I wanted to write historical fiction. I enjoyed the books so much that I wanted to write that genre! Which is how ‘The Great War of Hind’ was born.I remain perennially besotted with sci-fi comedy too; inevitably, I will write a book or a series in this genre. Maybe a few years down the line.
Can you please tell us a bit about your most recent book entitled The Great War of Hind, its overall plot and the key characters in it?The overall idea of the book is around how we believe epics written by Valmiki and Ved Vyas to be about Gods and real men. To me, Valmiki and Ved Vyas were the Stan Lee’s of their generation, who wrote these stories to regale people. In parallel, I had been toying with a simple logical idea of creation – God creating man and animals – and I saw no better way to tell the story than to pick mythological characters everyone knows and plug them into a story of the origin of mankind and animal-kind and how and why it all happened, and what happened after. ‘The Great War of Hind’ and ‘The Legend of Ramm’ series are built around this kernel.
Are you working on any other book(s)? If so, can you please tell us what we can expect to see from you in the future?Well, I am sort of obligated to finish this series (Legend of Ramm) now that I have started it. So that will be a couple of years of my life at least. Unless something else catches my fancy next, I should write the sci-fi comedy I have been hungering to write for a long time after that.
Can you please tell us about your approach to writing? For example, do you follow structures and writing rules? Or do you write in a free flow way? Do you have any particular time of the day you like to write? Or any specific environment you prefer to sit down and write?A significant amount of time for me goes in establishing the skeletal structure of the plot first. This takes a month or more (sometimes much more). Writing for me is about threading the needles I have laid down, as the plot. But it does get complicated at times. You might have a great idea while writing that completely muddles up the plot, or find it impossible to write to stick to the plot structure. So it is a tedious bone-crunching process.
I write best when I am constrained for time, when I am tired and stressed. There is no particular time for me – I just try and get in a little bit of writing everyday.
From your experiences, could you please share 2-3 top tips to help beginner authors who want to publish a novel?Read, read every day. And read the classics first to get a grounding in the language. You’ll get nowhere by reading the complete works of Chetan Bhagat.
Write a lot. Write your own blogs or for blogger networks. Keep that animal in you alive.
Be meticulous. A comma in the wrong place on one page can shave a point off book reviews. Every brick is important; every speck of cement is important in what you are building.
It’s quite another thing to sell a book in India though but in the long run, good writing, strong plot structure trumps short term gimmicks. Not everything you write will be a blockbuster hit, even if you get a selfie with some minor celebrity holding up your book.
How can people find out more about you?I tweet from @vaibrainmaker. I collate my satirical articles, book reviews and other random thoughts on the universe on my blog. My three books are on Amazon here: http://amzn.to/1YAvSYy
Over the next few years, the number of books will hopefully go up. God willing.
April 10, 2016
Book Review: No Shortcuts to the Top: Climbing the World's 14 Highest Peaks by Ed Viesturs
Continuing on with my current obsession with mountaineering stories (which started with Jon Krakauer's 'Into Thin Air') I picked up Ed Viesturs's 'No Shortcuts to the Top', wanting to understand the other 13 peaks higher than 8000 m. (Krakauer's book talks of the 1996 Everest tragedy only.) Viesturs climbed the peaks over a period of a decade and a half - all without bottled oxygen. Overall, I found the book hardly as inspirational or riveting (compared to Krakauer's, which arguably though has far more interesting base material) as advertised. It is the story of a man who had the physiology and the common sense at most times to let go of summit attempts, and to go through climbing all fourteen 8000'ers without even losing a digit to frostbite. Beyond that, there is not much going on for the book, except if you are a hardcore Viesturs or mountaineering fan. Some of the peak stories are disappointingly described: for example, "climbing peak XXX alpine style in 3 days" is not really what you expect when you read a book with such a title.
What I found interesting were the human stories, whenever Viesturs (and his ghost writer) step away from himself or mountaineering or his theory of "Summiting is optional, getting back is mandatory" and tell stories of real human beings who died or survived the mountains. People like J. C., Chantal, Scott Fischer, Rob Hall, et al bring an otherwise very very niche book alive.
Read only if you want to understand mountaineering.
