Dear me. You have my heartfelt sympathies if you have not ever had the good fortune to find yourself time for a P.G. Wodehouse book. That fine gentleman, I must say, is possibly the most talented author I have ever come across, in terms of the way he manipulates words and language. It’s a Herculean task to even try to copy him, for a classic P.G. Wodehouse book has certain defining elements.

A river flows through the Booker Prize-winning “The Famished Road”, and becomes an evocative metaphor of life and death. Similarly a river churns through the pages of Ben Okri’s novel “Starbook”, “big and swollen and mighty” (both the river and the novel).

“Pia looked at the lines more closely and could see that in one the red liquid was moving – it was bright red, oxygenated blood. The half-man was alive, or mostly alive. And he was stuck on a spike like a butterfly collector’s specimen.”

The author Barbara Demick was a reporter in South Korea and through this book, narrates the story of six defectors she met during her stay. She personally travelled to the north for reporting and was soon confronted by the north’s oppressive way of living. She has complied, her seven years of conversations with North Koreans into this eye opening book.

“Why Nations Fail” is an elaborate work by Daron Acemoglu and James A Robinson. While the former is a professor of Economics at MIT, who received an award for the most significant contribution in the field of Economics, the latter is a political scientist and an economist at Harvard who is also a world renowned expert on Latin-America and Africa. I think the MITvard collaboration is enough to tell you about the quality of the matter in the book.

In a heterogeneous, multi-cultural crowd like the one in our country, it is very easy to misinterpret and misquote a statement made by a person, however distinguished he or she may be. There will always be someone who would be offended by the opinions, and there would always be a politician ready to pounce on, and gain some political leverage. Such is the state of affairs in India, where the freedom to express is always accompanied by the right to protest, and politicizing everything is more of a duty.

We have hundreds of names for one entity. In every mythology, be it Greek, Egyptian, Norse or Hindu, there are many, many, many gods, because we have many, many, many religions.And that’s where everything begins to go downhill.

All of us have tried losing weight maybe for different reasons. And to do so we have sought help from various sources: websites, magazines, dadi-nani ke nuske, even joined a gym or yoga classes but to no gain.

Chaos Theory is the debut novel of Anuvab Pal who, apart from being an author, is also a playwright, screenwriter and stand-up comedian (he’s got a few videos on YouTube).
Now looking at the book cover and summary, you’d think it’s a typical love story, wondering if the two main characters –Mukesh and Sunita, will eventually get together or not. But it’s much more complicated that; things always are.

Yes you are right, its Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice.But why am I talking about this now? Because on Jan.28 it will be exactly 200 hundred years since Jane Austen introduced us to the travails of a mother trying to marry her five daughters, and the greater agony of the men who fall prey to her attempts.