Book Review: Dhanda by Shobha Bondre

I got onto this book after reading the fantastic 'Rokda' from the same publisher. I am in a phase where I am finding contemporary Indian history interesting, which is why I breezed through Shobha Bondre's 'Dhanda' in two days. Though I liked the book, it had two major flaws. One, except the Gujarati Mayor character, …

Book Review: 1857 – The Real Story of the Great Uprising

Written by a Brahmin mendicant (Vishnu Bhatt), who somehow fortuitously ended up being in parts of India where (and when) the revolt was breaking out, '1857' is a fantastic book chronicling the first great uprising of the Indian freedom struggle. Vishnu Bhatt wrote the book as a diary - which was published only after his …

Book Review: Primal Woman

Sunil Gangopadhyay was one of the most prolific writers in Bangla. His books, over the decades, have enriched the readers and reached new heights of popularity. He is my favourite author, of course, having read almost all his novels since they came in periodical magazines with a lot of suspense between a week’s separation. Not …

Book Review: The Middleman

Men, authors, books come and go and yet our country remains filled with angst ridden youth. Sankar’s Middleman is a Bengali novel translated to English and even though it chronicles the life of an unemployed young man in 1970’s Calcutta (as it was called then), it could well have been set in 2014 in any …

Book Review: Selected Poems by Joy Goswami

It is a recent habit of mine to read a book from the very beginning. A lucky thing, I felt as I started the poetry collection by Joy Goswami (translated so amazingly by Sampurna Chattarji). The 20 page foreword by Sampurna about Joy, his poetry and some snippets from his letters or various essays was …

Book Review: Teresa’s Man and Other Stories From Goa

Damodar Mauzo is a Sahitya Akademi awardee, and a highly respected figure in Konkani Literature. And so, picking this book as one I really wanted to read and review was a no-brainer. "Short stories do not say this happened and this happened and this happened. They are a microcosm and a magnification rather than a …

Book Review: Indian Tango

There are certain books with which you have love & hate relationships in the sense that they just don’t strike enough chord with you so as to grip you along through-out. At the same time, however, there remains something in the book which doesn't let you leave it in between. Fitting perfectly in that canvas …

Book Review: The Love Letter and Other Stories

Do you like short stories? What do you like about them? The fact that they are short? That they are stories? Not novellas? Or big giant novels? That more often than not, they just deliver a knockout punch smack on your face and disappear? Or, that they are like the cup of coffee early in the …