Monday 23 January 2012

My Nephew's Gold Medal


   My 2 year old nephew has done something that I could not manage to do in 26 years of my life. Wining a GOLD medal in a sporting event.

  It was his playgroup's sports day where kids from the same school but different branches had come. Guess it had kids from around 7 to 8 branches.

 I couldn't see it but my brother says he won the race by a distance. The way Usain Bolt wins in Olympics. Here are a few pics from the event.


 The man on the podium himself.On the 1st Position.

 Flaunting his GOLD Medal.

Awesome!!!
Cheers!

Sunday 8 January 2012

Revolution2020 and Chetan Bhagat

            I thought I may not be doing it soon but finally I did manage to read Chetan Bhagat's latest attempt to write. Revolution2020, the name of his latest book. Considering the fact that I stay in a city in USA with not a great Indian Population, getting a book by Chetan Bhagat would have been a challenge. Thanks to my roomie who suddenly felt the need to get the entire Chetan Bhagat pack from his latest visit to India. And no I will not be giving any spoiler alert cause I will not talk about the plot of the book more than what is mentioned on the cover page.
           
            So the book is his latest attempt at writing stories for a movie. I have no objections to that. Rather I love couple of his books but this time it was the lamest attempt he could make. I might go to the extent of saying that the story was in equal terms to the movie Bodyguard or any Ekta Kapoor serials. It is a story of three childhood friends. One girl, 2 guys. Both love the same girl. Both are heroes at the end but the path they take are very very different. I mean Come on how many movies have we seen with the same story and same ending. Right from beginning to end the movie..oops..book was entirely predictable and bland.

            It is a  fact that I am an avid reader and would normally complete a 300 page book within a span of 3 hours. It took me more than 3 days to finish this book. Somehow every other lame thing seemed more important than reading the book. Which for starters is not a good sign.If I go by stats, I did finish 'Five Point Someone' in 3 hours and '2states- the story of my marriage' in 4 hours'. In order to give an unbiased review of the book and not to forget that he does actually have awesome writing skills, I read '2 states' again before writing this blog.

          Compared to his set of books, I would rate this even below 'One night@call center' in which he had kinda screwed the end. Apart from a predictable boring story this book also did not have his uncanny knack of describing the heroine of the story.Or any scene of the story. If the reader cannot imagine the scene, it is a big failure of the author's skill ,according to me. The reason why Dan Brown or JK Rowling are so successful fiction writers cause of the way they describe the scenes.And this is really important for people who rate books more than the movies made from it. As long as we are into description of scenes or characters, I would like to recommend you all to read a book called 'Anything for you Maam' by Tushar Raheja. It has the story on the same lines as '2 states' ( and of-course it was published before '2 states') but unfortunately the author was not as renowned as Chetan Bhagat. The description of Characters in Tushar Raheja's book would make you fall in love with them.
 
          I guess Chetan Bhagat got more busy in answering the calls of the Murthys who asked for a better system in IITs. Well Mr Murthy was not wrong, we do need a better system in the IITs or our education system but more on this topic later. I do not want to get diverted from our main topic. Only if he would have given more thoughts on a better story than to use his reputation, we would have enjoyed the book more. And all this cause we do expect great books from you.

         I know that most English authors condemn Chetan Bhagat for his books which has a lot of grammatical mistakes but they do so for Dan Brown also. And trust me for a normal reader all that matters in the end is a good story. After coming up with classics like the '2 states' ( I just love the book cause I can connect so well with it) this book was really disappointing. Hope we get a better book next time. And sorry to say but no one would dare make a movie on this book.We all watch Ekta Kapoor serials in India.

Cheers!