Hoorray!

For 2014, I wanted to read at least 100 books. Across genres, in both English and Tamil. Accessibility was not a problem, since I have bought a large number of books in the last 2-3 years. However, I forgot to consider that this is an election year. Over the last 2-3 months, I have been deeply immersed in following the people, the trends, the incidents and everything that a huge election like this brings. I was totally sucked in. As an ardent supporter of Modi and BJP, I wanted to take part in this process much more intently, though in the end, all I could do was go to the polling booth on voting day and press the button. I was so immersed in it, that I even forgot to complete and publish this post, which i started to pen last month! Anyway, now that elections are over and results are out - technically, they came out yesterday since it's already 12 AM on the 17th of May, 2014 - I can now go back to my books. I seriously have to go back to my books! It's not like...

Do you love masala movies? If you do, then you’ll definitely like Along The Way. To be true to the style of the book, it is the story of one Mr. VSA Tanikaburla by Mr. TGC Prasad. Venkata Subramaniam Adisankara Tanikaburla, also called as Venkat or more jovially as VSAT is our hero - who starts off as a very unassuming third year mechanical engineering student at NIT, Kozhikode and ends up as a... easy to guess if you like or at least have watched a masala movie - especially the Telugu or Tamil varieties. When you watch one such movie, you can predict what will happen next. This book is very similar, since it is full of cliches of the ‘boy-meets-girl’ kind and has everything - love, friendship, family, sorrow, trials and triumphs, except one thing - fights. In spite of the cliches, I couldn’t help laughing at the so many humorous digs at friends, girlfriends, parents, in-laws and most importantly - managers at workplaces. And our hero is honest enough to be “vocally self-critical”(...

The Secret of the Nagas is the part two of the Shiva Trilogy and continues exactly where the first book The Immortals of Meluha stops. The book begins with a small, but intense skirmish between the mysterious Naga warrior and the Shiva-Sati couple. The couple underestimate the Naga and end up injured. But what puzzles them is the apparent lack of viciousness on part of the Naga, who, although he had many chances to kill either of them, leaves Shiva and Sati alive with only minor wounds. From this point the story thrillingly unfolds further. A lot of new characters are introduced, and identities and backgrounds of quite a few old characters are revealed - many of them quite shocking. But nothing is as shocking as the revelation on the very last page of the book! Like in the first part, in this part too, Amish, through his protagonist, continues to raise the question - if something is apparently evil, is it actually evil? What is good and what is evil? Through Shiva's dis...

I just finished reading it this morning and... WHOA! What a book! I cannot stop thinking about all the stuff that the story has in it - I'm drowning in a deluge of my own thoughts! No, Shiva is not the hero of the entire story. He is still the protagonist, but someone almost displaced him as the hero of this particular book in the series - by his valor, ability and courage, as much as the stoicism he displays (for which he is even chided!) No wonder he's the namesake of the most popular God of the Hindu pantheon, who has awesomed his way into the faith systems of other lands and peoples too! Someone else almost became the villain, but like his dunderhead, "goat headed" fool of a namesake in the Hindu Puranas, he's simply too dumb and incapable to be one and has to be remain the puppet of the actual mastermind. And who that master puppeteer, is still a mystery, in spite of the smug presumption that makes us think that we can hazard a guess. I know I am just r...

If I should start properly writing (including reviews) about books, which book should I start with? I thought it would be a tough hill to climb. That is until I saw the Bhagavad Gita. Or rather the few different commentaries of the Gita that I possess and I was no more bothered about finding a "first book" to write about. I have not read the Gita in full yet. Hope to do it some day. Gita is for a lifetime study. It cannot be read and imbibed completely in one stretch. Many of the ideas illustrated in the Gita can be understood only if you have the relevant experiences, maturity, as well as the ability to process those thoughts. The exact version of the Gita that I want to mark my beginning - auspiciously - is the Universal Message of the Bhagavad Gita - An Exposition of the Gita in the Light of Modern Thoughts and Modern Needs . It was transcribed and compiled from Swami Ranganathananda's "series of Sunday discourses, from 1988 to 1990, at the 1200-capacity Viv...