THE INDIAN COMMENTATOR

Image Courtesy: Google Image Courtesy: Google Are you a lover of thrillers? Have your senses adapted enough to understand the line where characters and plot become one and where characters trace their trajectories straight into the readers’ hearts? This second question is especially complicated, since even some writers cannot point out where this line is. The best demonstrative strategy is to take you to some of the books as instances that unsettled the world and left it on the mercy of imaginative survival; The Da Vinci Code for example or Hunger Games . We loved their story line, their plot and of course, Robert Langdon or Katniss Everdeen, they are vulnerable and their pain is intimate for us. Image Courtesy: Google The Krishna Key is based on conspiracy theories that suggest that the Vedic civilization is the mother of all civilizations. Aswin Sanghy compares the idea of a supreme and extremely developed civilization to the lost city of Atlantis . By doing thi...

Image Courtesy: Google Cannanore will soon become a big city, but right now, it is a small town, where people still prefer having their tea, coffee and meals from coffee houses that stinks of urine, sweat and smoke. This is not the only reason for naming it small. Every city is like a human being. And like humans, cities have thoughts as well. Cannanore town is small is its thoughts too. Thoughts of a city are its streets. The streets in Cannanore city are quite narrow and thus I deduced my conclusion that it is indeed a small in city, small in size and small in mind. In this small town, one evening, a coffee house was busy as a slaughter house. The slaughter house imagery partially owes its credit to the way people’s faces looked after their sojourn inside the houses for tea or meals and their puffed up pot bellies and partly it owed to the vast number of people flowing in and out. A person in a wrinkled grey shirt walked faster towards the entrance. He placed the b...

Image Courtesy: Google Obituary is too limited a word. One could not find a label if one scrolled down the left column in this blog that reads “Obituary”. There are many articles, poems and anecdotes about people who passed away, but none of those attempts to honour their memories can are called obituaries. This is not just because these pieces of literatures were written not exclusively in a style apt commonly to obituaries that one reads in newspapers. There is one more reason, one undoubtedly unearthly, uncommon reason. It’s the conception of death itself. Yash Chopra, the maker of classics in Indian movie screen, transcended into another dimension today. Death is not a word that one could use for him. He has an upcoming film, which people across the world wait for release; he is known as a franchise in the film industry and is a bearer of many more titles as an individual. How can it be concluded that a so-called ‘dead man’ has an upcoming movie? How can a franchise die?...

Image Courtesy: Google F ractured Legend is Kranthi Askani’s debut novel. The title, Fractured Legend well represents the broken and ill tendered state of the plot. The book incorporates magic realism,  gothic  elements as per the blurb piece. Fractured Legend opens with a statues deliquescing, in the Book 1, “Slave”. The novel is presented in three books. Book 1 is titled “Slave”. Book 2 is called “Manuscript” and Book 3 is “A Very Long Letter”. Book 1, book 2 and book 3 are split into three chapters each. Fractured Legend connects the story of four women in a string of narratives, in which magical realism and  gothic  elements play a disastrous role, leaving the plot murky, uninteresting and impossible to associate with (intellectually or emotionally). Two more artistic techniques remain surprisingly traceable in the work. One is absurdism. Absurdity lurches upon you from the first chapter of the Book 1. The non-presence of action is one of the re...