Browsing All Posts filed under »Books«

Have You Heard the Sound of Your Own Voice?

November 21, 2021

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A plug for Krithika’s book, available here: https://www.amazon.in/dp/B09DP2SFGM In her words: “I recently self-published a non-fiction book on depression. It’s called “Have You Heard the Sound of Your Own Voice?” It was written with the intention of hand-holding students who feel suicidal/depressed on Indian college campuses. I am wondering if you can help me in […]

Readers Write In #401: What Reading means to me

August 26, 2021

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(by G Waugh) “Yours is a very difficult job. Writing is not something everyone can do. I know there is so much effort behind every sentence you write. It is very hard to put together thoughts, feelings and ideas into sentences and bring them as a coherent whole” My friend was telling me this some […]

Readers Write In #390: What’s powering Ponniyin Selvan 1?

July 30, 2021

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(by Karthik Amarnath) When I first saw the poster of Mani Ratnam’s next movie— the historical fiction Ponniyin Selvan— I was struck by the title. PS-I. For a moment, it sounded like a science thriller. Like the launch of a new PSLV satellite. I get it, it’s a “new-age” title, slapped on a literary classic, written three […]

Interview: TM Krishna (on his transformation from artist to activist)

July 6, 2021

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For more, subscribe to FILM COMPANION SOUTH: http://bit.ly/2xoNult Copyright ©2021 Film Companion.

Readers Write In #374: Half a Kilo Mixture

June 29, 2021

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(by V. Vijaysree) Four years after Madras on my Mind, A City in Stories, here is another Chennai-centric anthology, this time by a single author. In her debut collection of short stories, Half a Kilo Mixture, Ranjitha Ashok captures the changing mores of Chennai through a host of female protagonists. Most readers, especially those who […]

My two-part interview by Raunaq Mangottil (on nostalgia, Nayagan, theaters, reading, screenwriting & train journeys)

June 11, 2021

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For more, subscribe to FILM COMPANION SOUTH: http://bit.ly/2xoNult Copyright ©2021 Raunaq Mangottil.

Summer Camp

May 1, 2021

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Vikram M N, who has published film articles and short stories in this blog has come up with his second novel ‘Summer Camp’. The first draft written close to ten years before and even before his first novel ‘Neha – Yet Another Love Story’ Summer Camp started out as a novel about a young boy […]

My interview on Chalchitra Talks (by Vaibhav Munjal)

March 13, 2021

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For more, subscribe to FILM COMPANION SOUTH: http://bit.ly/2xoNult Copyright ©2021 Chalchitra Talks.

A Street Puppy’s Guide to Indian Religious Wisdom

February 28, 2021

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During the COVID lockdown, blog reader ‘doctorhari’ co-wrote a book with Iniya, the fourteen year-old girl whose writings have featured in ‘Reader’s Write’ in a couple of times. The book is titled ‘A STREET PUPPY’S GUIDE TO INDIAN RELIGIOUS WISDOM’. It’s a short, funny, thought-provoking as well as provocative primer on Advaita. Rather than presenting […]

Readers Write In #341: ‘Outline’ by Rachel Cusk: a delineation through dialogue

February 28, 2021

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(by Kannan Baskar) Outline, a 2014 novel by Canadian born British writer Rachel Cusk, is the first book in The Outline trilogy. The story, set in Athens, is a series of conversations that the narrator has with friends, strangers, and students. The narrator Faye, a British writer visiting Greece to teach in a writing seminar, […]

Readers Write In #340: On ‘Drishyam’ and ‘The Devotion of Suspect X’

February 25, 2021

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(by V Vijaysree) Every serious movie buff, who enjoyed watching the Malayalam movie Drishyam, knows that the writer-director of the film may have been inspired by the plot of The Devotion of Suspect X. The book, on which the movie was based, was written by Japanese author, Keigo Higashino. It features Detective Galileo, a fictional […]

Surge On Like a River

January 16, 2021

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V Shyamala, founder of Suzhi Publications, has translated into English a collection of essays by popular Tamil orator Smt. Bharathy Bhaskar, published in Tamil as ‘Nee Nadhi Pola Odikkonduiru’. She asked if I could do a review. I couldn’t, but I said I could put up an excerpt on the blog. Here it is. Do […]

Readers Write In #319: What I read in 2020

December 31, 2020

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(by Eswar) புத்தாண்டு சென்றாண்டுக்கு நீ மற்றொரு ஆண்டுநேற்றைக்கு நீ இன்னது ஒரு நாளைமணிக்கு வெறும் நொடிமனிதனுக்கு மட்டும்நீ தனி (New YearTo last year you are but another  Just another day for yesterdayTo an hour you are only a second  To us you are always special) In order to comprehend this timeless eternity that we live in, we punctuate time […]

Readers Write In #318: Top ten books I read in 2020

December 30, 2020

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(by G Waugh) A Little Life by HanyaYanagahira This was like something I have never read before and it lived up to the hype that BaradwajRangan had given in one of his essays. A dense tale that spans almost the entire lifetime of its lead, Jude St Francis simmers with marvellously observed vignettes and intensely […]

Readers Write In #290: The Story of My Experiments with Truth, by MK Gandhi

October 29, 2020

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(by G Waugh)  “I discovered that my obsession for having each thing in the right place, each subject at the right time, each word in the right style, was not the well-deserved reward of an ordered mind but just the opposite: a complete system of pretense invented by me to hide the disorder of my […]

Readers Write In #289: Aims, a Memoir

October 24, 2020

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(by G Waugh) Born into a middle class family that subsisted on a single income, there was only one purpose for which I was thrust into education- ‘settling’ in life. ‘Settling’ meant only one thing- getting a well-paid job, marrying and having kids. After slogging for over four years in an area where I was […]

Readers Write In #282: Crash Course in Tamil Short Fiction 101

October 16, 2020

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(by V Vijaysree) Though I speak Tamil fluently,I tend to stumble over the printed word. I almost never read for fun in Tamil.Unsurprisingly, the only Tamil authors I know of are the ones who have written for the movies. I had no idea how much I liked being read to in my first language till […]

Readers Write In #280: Book review of Svetlana Alexievich’s Second Hand Time (2013)

October 12, 2020

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(by G Waugh) You are a woman with two kids. You own a Masters degree and work as a professor in some university. You had free education, free medical facilities and so do your children. Your husband works as an engineer in some State-owned company. You live in a modest apartment and since there is […]

Readers Write In #278: The Catcher in the Rye

October 4, 2020

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(by Vikram MN) The Catcher in the Rye killed me. It surely did. There are a million ways to express joy but I choose to express the way Holden does. Every day I read the book I thought of various things to write about it and various way to start the review but I did […]

Readers Write In #275: Friends of Vishnupuram meet Mani Ratnam

September 26, 2020

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(by Eswar) On 27th September 2020, the friends of Vishnupuram will meet director Mani Ratnam for an online conversation. On this occasion, here is a brief note on the relationship between readers and writers and how two blogs are keeping an old tradition alive today. Tamil literary tradition has always fostered a particular relationship. A […]