THE INDIAN COMMENTATOR

A word on actor Irfan Khan's passing away: He is one of my favourite actors since childhood. I grew up watching such legendary series in Doordarshan those days like The Great Maratha. Irfan's role as Najeeb Khan was iconic. That was the early days of his career and my sensibilities as an audience or spectator. Through Pan Singh Tomar, Jurassik World and many other movies, he kept amazing me. Today, I heard about his death while working on a short story for a reading app named Pratilipi. The title of the story was "The Magician who Vanished". Just as I finished the story, I looked up from my word file to go through some WhatsApp messages and found the status on one of my friend's number. Perhaps the story "The Magician who Vanished" is about Irfan Khan. In the story, a father passes away and the son is having difficulty accepting his death. The son blames himself for his father's death. Right then, someone comes along an...

Dr Kay Scarpetta works as a chief medical examiner in Virginia, USA. Her job is to inspect dead bodies. Bodies are brought to her for postmortem analysis. They arrive after a death sentence, murder, or accident. Her office is practically in a morgue.  Cruel and Unusual  is written by Patricia Cornwell. This novel deals with the cases attended by Dr Kay Scarpetta. A mere description of the work Dr Scarpetta does in the morgue is a thriller in its own right. It has its mystery too. A lot of dissection and description of human anatomy churns one’s stomach.  My attention was hooked from the beginning. I wanted to see how this novel branches out to be a detective-fiction. I had read in a review that is the best detection fiction since Sherlock Holmes. That’s a huge credit. I am not a Sherlock Holmes fan. I had stopped reading detective fiction ever since I left high school. During those days, I used to dream about writing books. Now I write books. The difference...