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Showing posts from 2007

Overview of Anita Desai's Early Novels

One of India’s most celebrated writers, Anita Desai visited Delhi on 1st December 2007. Taking part in the brief talk on her novels, Anita Desai made a rare appearance amidst enthusiastic fans and readers thanks to the well organized function that was put together by Random House. As most of us already know, her name was nominated thrice for Booker Price but it happened that her daughter Kiran Desai won it for the book Inheritance of Loss in the year 2006. But coming back to Anita Desai, it has been a long, interesting journey for her because she recalled how it felt to be a writer in early post colonial India. When her American publishers asked her how it felt to be a writer in India, she recalls telling them, “It is like writing in a cave.” The reason, she explained, was that she kept on writing and writing but didn’t get feedback on her writings for several years. It pained her that while her novels were studied in Universities abroad, it hadn’t been the same in her own country, Ind

No Smoking, Gentlemen!

A movie reviewer wrote that cinema is all about 3E's: entertainment, education and enlightenment. But it neednt really be, right? Let's talk about this movie No Smoking . This definitely wasn’t a movie I wanted to see despite being someone who really thinks John is a sensational actor. Right from his first movie, I was one of those movie buffs who strongly predicted that he has far to go because his potential was definitely unexploited. Through every movie, John chiseled his body of work but Anurag Kashyap's No Smoking beats everything else. So let’s go to the heart of the story. There were just about five or six people in the theatre for this movie. No one looked remotely interested at the beginning. There was no sense of expectation in the air. It was like a bunch of sad people opting for the saddest movie in town. But when the movie began, I was transported to another world that had nothing to do with reality yet smacked of it too. The movie was basically about K, (sex