JishnuGopanbr

Great stories. “The Great Stories are the ones you have heard and want to hear again. The ones you can enter anywhere and inhabit comfortably. They don’t deceive you with thrills and trick endings. They don’t surprise you with the unforeseen. They are as familiar as the house you live in. Or the smell of your lover’s skin. You know how they end, yet you listen as though you don’t. In the way that, although you know that one day you will die, you live as though you won't. In the Great Stories, you know who lives, who dies, who finds love, and who doesn’t. And yet you want to know again.” (Pg no. 229) This quote from The God of Small Things sums up this book, and made me re-read the story. This review contains spoilers, but they don’t affect the reading experience. Even in the novel, the first few chapters describe all the major events that will happen later. This book does not concern itself with spoilers and plot twists; it wants to tell a story and demands our attention from t...

 Poets writing about flowers and birds will keep writing about a world without borders. Writers who saw the unpleasant truth will keep pondering the borders we drew within ourselves. Dreamers keep on dreaming about a world where the children don't have to pay the price for the deeds of their parents. As they keep writing and pondering and dreaming, War mongers will not stop mongering for more wars. Terrorisers will not stop terrorising. The drummers and those who lit the firecrackers keep on dancing to the cries of mothers who stand beside their dead children, who paid the price. And Kashmir, The land of graveyards. Where the corpses of humans nourish the land, making the Kashmiri Iris bloom brighter and Green Apples taste sweeter. Where the smoke-filled lungs of Jammu heaved with the sound 'Azadi' that muffled by the thudding of military boots. This Kashmir will always be the child who paid the price for Her parents' deed.

Gauri was the only girl child to her parents and was blind when she was born. After 12 long and happy years of childhood, she gained sight one day. In her words, it was “the mysterious event,” but it was every bit as usual as her story goes. Irrespective of her inability to see, Gauri had a childhood of a million colors. She had two elder brothers who loved her unconditionally, but there was always a physical barrier between them. Their realities felt so different, though they had a similar childhood. The brothers were in a separate world of their imaginations, along with toy cars, bikes, and guns. That was a place where Gauri had no importance, still, she could be seen stumbling behind her brothers. For Gauri, the world was what she imagined. The disparity in their world did not bother her, as her inability to see also made her not see those differences.  The world that she imagined was a beautiful and happy one. It had everyone and everything she dearly loved: her parents, her ...

  In 1Q84, Professor Ebisuno uses the whirlpool in a river as a metaphor to explain the situation he and Tengo (protagonist) found themselves in. Professor Ebisuno is the guardian of a teenage girl who envisioned a story that captivated him. But that story lacked a professional touch for it to get published. So the protagonist Tengo works as a ghostwriter to finish that book, which eventually gets published and critically acclaimed. That book becomes the center of the whirlpool, which uncovers the dark past involving that soft-spoken teenage girl. The whirlpool which started as a mere disturbance in the current, eventually starts to pull everyone that was involved in its creation. There is nothing much left for the characters to do except face the dire consequences. This whirlpool will slowly reveal the ugly truth that was hidden beneath the river, these truths can only harm all those who become aware of it. This is just a part of the story among all the other crazy stuffs that is ...

Urdu, once the language of proud nawabs and mesmerizing poetic wordplay with its impeccable artistic imagination, is now a dying language. Universities and monuments are nothing but cemeteries and ruined remains of a once glorious past. "Urdu may be dying, and In Custody by Anita Desai may in part be an unheard lament for that death," said Salman Rushdie in an introduction for one of the editions of In Custody. This is such a beautiful piece of work by Desai. Intricately woven storyline and character development. The final pages show, only in limited words, the patriarchal conditioning of the men in this story. Though in limited space, that theme of patriarchy was impactful. It offers a type of twist in its theme, not in the plot. This book felt like an old ghazal which I could understand the meaning of. It depicts the beauty of the Urdu language effortlessly. The characters show their deep remorse over their language being forgott en as years pass by. Urdu poets and their ad...

  Quichotte by Salman Rushdie is the type of book that I loved so much that I wanted to savor every moment by reading it slowly but also devouring it as fast as possible because of the beautifully evolving story. The story follows a person named Ismail, who is addicted to watching too many TV shows. He creates his alter ego Quichotte, and goes on a road trip through America to make a famous TV show host fall in love with him. Here Salman Rushdie takes a unique way of storytelling, wherein in the second chapter of the book he introduces the author who is writing the story of Quichotte (Ismail), it is like fiction inside another fiction. This brings us to the genre of this book – a Metafiction. The life of the author is the reflection of the story of Quichotte. At a certain point in the book, the reality of the author’s life gets intertwined with the fiction of Quichotte’s story, perplexing the reader with Rushdie’s effortless storytelling. Quichotte is a brilliantly funny work. ...