Magic Moments

The StoryGraph I am floored by the analytics and insights they have worked to provide. It is clear they have used AI and ML techniques for annotating the various moods associated with the books, from audiences around the world – like a manual crowd annotation of sorts. This is great since it is manual effort yet, labelling of the dataset, but the people on the platform are many, and I can only see the platform grow. Goodreads is really old, 2000s. In 2020s we need StoryGraph . I want to do certain recommendation system, like this website does with respect to emotional moods, but a bit different. Catering to Reading Challenges prompts. Like, you get book suggestions for prompts like ‘a lady of the cover’, ‘deals with Jewish traditions’ or ‘won JCB Price in last 10 years’. So, that is the idea. May be I’ll make it, hopefully I can, and leave a website for you to try. The Enneagram Type The Enneagram Personality Type – this is the recently trending personality system, a pointer o...

The first movie 'The Invisible Guardian' begins with the killings of several teenage girls and elaborate staging of their bodies by the river in the damp valley of Elizondo. Amaia Salazar, our protagonist, returns there, her hometown, as the Chief Investigator for the case. She heads the homicide department. The serial killings seem aimed at young girls who don't uphold the traditional norms and have begun exploring their sexuality. Through the case, Amaia grapples with her own demons, her relationship issues and traumatic memories of abuse from her past. We get to know that her mother had abused her, being seemingly senile herself, and was then admitted to a facility. The setting of the damp valley where it rains all hours of the day, the cloudy scenery, the fog covered thick forest maintain a sinister vibe throughout the movie. It is an apt backdrop for a crime thriller, with supernatural undertones. The mythical beast  basajaun , the big hairy beast of the forest, seems ...

  There is a certain allure to a foreign land, a foreign culture, a different language, unchartered territories and a promise of romantic adventure. The latest offering from Netflix ‘Emily in Paris’ gives us all of these and more. It is all of 10 episodes of 25 or so minutes each, and is worth a binge-watch. It’s about a social media content strategist, Emily Cooper, played by Lily Collins, who moves to Paris from Chicago to work for a marketing firm, a big career opportunity, dreaming of a wonderful life. It’s about her adventures both in career and romantic front, as she learns French, making hilarious mistakes and feeding her Instagram with all-things-Paris. We watch the beauty of Paris in its culture of life-first-work-second, all things luxurious- from fashion to perfume to wine, the spiraling staircase of a hundred-year old building where Emily stays, the ornate architecture, the old-world charm mingling effortlessly with the new, the elaborate office dinners, the picturesq...

I had expected to be bored thinking it to be some over-the-top comedy and quit watching this midway. I had not expected to be sucked into their lives, in upstate Manhattan, and feel their life change over the ten seasons so personally. Ten years in the lives of these characters. And this attachment to that apartment. I had not expected that this sitcom that had been airing globally for ten long years, to not at all be ‘over-hyped’. I wish I had set aside my judgement and for once watched this during my college days. It would have been such a cherished experience. It would have validated all the emotions of those days. Watching the six friends’ personal trajectory from Season 1 to 10, over the ten years, through ten Thanksgivings and Christmases and Hanukah, was such a pleasure. I never knew I could enjoy comedy, and in comes Chandler. I remember how in the first few episodes, I couldn’t even remember their names, and now they feel as real and relatable as any other person. We all h...

At the very first glance and search through the Kindle Unlimited collection in amazon.in, it feels disappointing. But I discovered, through various online lists and some filtering, there are many interesting titles worth a read. I would now for the next few months be regularly reviewing some of these titles that I discover on the platform. (Hopefully!) The following are a few short mythological binge reads I devoured in a day. Each is around 30-50 pages, which you can easily complete reading in a single sitting. So, fret not, your investment in this platform would be worth it. 1. Bhoomija  After reading Anand Neelakanthan's prequel to Baahubali, 'The Rise of Sivagami', I was a fan of his storytelling and narration. I had interacted with him in 2017 Blogchatter Writing Festival over the Twitter prime time chat, and I remember receiving this book then through the event. As bloggers and aspiring fiction writers, we have a lot to learn from his works. So, I browsed a few books ...

A Netflix Original, released on 24th June, Bulbbul is a different take on the subject of witches - 'chudail' as is called in India, narrating the tale from the perspective of the out-worldly being. It is India's very own 'revenant' tale - a person who has returned, especially supposedly from the dead.  The storytelling in the movie is quite gripping. The way it intertwines sweet memory and nostalgia of childhood, the grief and longing of missing someone, the beautiful colors and scenes of old world Bengali zamindar family of British Raj with the Gothic-like feel of spook and fable and a tale of revenge, is remarkable. The dialogues are no nonsense. There's this poetry piece or song - that is sung by two central characters in two different situations, rendering a totally different meaning to the words each of the times. There's a hint of metaphor and word play that seems naturally drawn into conversation. The entire movie is visually appealing - the red hues ...

This is the first Anand Neelakanthan book in my ‘Read’ shelves in GoodReads now. I devoured the book, all in three days. Having watched the Bahubali movies, I was intrigued about the book. I had received this book with the author’s signature in 2018 May, as a gift token, from Blogchatter, for volunteering in their writing festival. Since then, didn’t really get a chance to read it. I returned home to Bhubaneswar last week, from Mumbai. So, during the self-imposed home quarantine I had awesome time reading this about 500 page kinda thriller. I would just sit in the balcony in the morning breeze (the weather here is really good these days, cloudy but it doesn’t rain) with my cup of black pepper chai and Marie biscuits and keep reading to my fill. Best time ever, since months. Sivagami is 17 year old who has grown in her father’s friend’s home, after her father was given the capital punishment, in quite a brutal way, for treachery, when she was five. She is filled with unanswer...

We all have that one friend. Not the one that is a jerk, no. Not the one that gets good grades at school without studying, either. Also not the one who steals your longest fries, which might be the same as the first I mentioned. None of them is the friend I’m talking about. I’m talking about those friends that enlighten you, that teach you stuff, that help you keep loneliness away and bring new meaning to your life. We all have that one friend. I’m talking about books, good people. And our favourite ones, those that scarred us so deep that we have to read and re-read them over and over again, and each time we do it, we find things we didn’t find the last time. Books invariably change our lives in a wide array of ways. So today I would talk about books that have changed my life, particularly the  top-three books that changed the way I see life . Let’s start with the one I read most times. Maybe six or seven times, not that I can remember how many times I flipped thro...

Empress Ki Poster (behance.net) Empress Ki is the most elaborate, gripping, and thrilling series I have watched this year. And at 51 episodes , it is the longest Korean drama series I have ever watched. Even though the number seems daunting and too much, it’s worth it all. If you like period dramas, you won’t want to give this one a miss. It was in 2016 that I first read about Empress Ki, the historical drama that had garnered much praise and accolades from the audience and critics alike. Most Korean dramas are just 16 or 20 episodes long. So 51 seemed never-ending to me then. It wasn’t until 2017 that I decided to at least try the first episode. And I was hooked. But owing to the various circumstances I didn’t continue watching it. It was just last month that I remembered this epic story and watched it to completion within just a few days. Believe it or not, midway through it, I was almost literally pulling my hair out, in anticipation of what would happen next. I wou...

I watched TVF's recently released dramedy 'Yeh Meri Family' after reading a tweet about it. Then when I was in the second episode a friend recommended it to me just the moment I was about to recommend the same to her. Just like telepathy. Then, I knew this adorable story of a 12-year-old Harshu and his family in The Summer of '98 was a very special one. Being a 90's kid, I could relate to each and every detail in the series. The siblings' fights were exactly similar down to the very argument on who had to bring the clothes from the terrace and who had to fill up the water bottles and put them in the fridge. How often as kids, we thought our parents are so uncool till that moment when we realized otherwise!  "Papa cool dikhte nahi, Papa cool hain." Planning with friends, being the obedient one when parents fight, and sneaking around the kitchen to find something to eat- this web series took me back to my childhood and relive it all. ...

Sassy Go Go (Cheer Up!!) (Source: Soompi.com) Perhaps I am missing school, my own carefree days of yore. As much as I say that they were carefree days, I just know that they were not. We struggled for marks, toiled hard for securing a good rank and position in the class, hated our parents for comparing us with our classmates, and sighed inaudibly when the tuitions and extra classes coincided our play hours. I liked studying. I would study the textbooks, go through the class notes and also solve the test papers bought specifically for 10th board exams. But then I was very insecure too, had a huge inferiority complex, and a painful introversion as big as a mountain. I was good at studying. No, let me rephrase it. I was only good at studying. I didn’t do well in sports or quiz competitions or debates. I had no interest in leadership. I feared being the center of attention. But as far as marks were concerned, I knew I would get decent figures if I put in more number of hours. ...

When I watched the trailer of ‘The Handmaiden’, I had a picture of who is innocent, who is being tricked and the suspicious hints in the storyline. But what I found in the first half of the movie, was totally different from the impression that the trailer had had. A Korean girl from a con artists’ household travels to a rich Japanese home to play Miss Hideko’s personal maid, Tamako, with the mission of making her fall for The Count- another acquaintance who wants to get her inheritance for himself by marrying her. Things go out of the plan when Tamako feels for her missus- pity, love and remorse for the innocent being that she was and wants to prevent The Count from taking advantage of her and hurting her in the process of acquiring her treasures. Tamako herself is in dilemma, as she wants riches to fulfill her own dreams, but wants Hideko to be safe from their ploy. Lady Hideko is delicately beautiful. She was raised as a virtual prisoner by her uncle, the book collec...

Kafka On The Shore: Source Haruki Murakami uses seemingly irrelevant series of events and occurrences to weave a gripping plot in ‘Kafka on the Shore’ . These events sometimes are the normal natural day to day happenings and sometimes they border on the metaphysical world of dreams, hypnosis, animal spirits and other pseudo-realities. What starts as a boring detailed interview, report or letter ends up being a mind-bending thrill. Then there comes showers of fish and leeches, encounters with a ghost or a living spirit and other weird happenings. It may sound like themes borrowed from urban legends but it’s perfectly natural in this universe. Two parallel stories are narrated in alternate chapters – one is that of Kafka Tamura and other is that of Nakata. Kafka Tamura is a runaway from home , seeking freedom and independence, and perhaps searching for his long-lost mother and sister or vaguely put wanting to meet them at least once. He steals as many things from home a...