Bangalore ! Habba-bubba !

Feels great to be back, though I did have fun in Mumbai and Kolenchery. The drive down south and back wasn't all that bad. The baby was easier to manage in the car than the maid, actually. The maid felt sick halfway through and wanted a newspaper to hold against her chest - an age-old remedy for nausea, she informed us. I gave her a page from Kichan's copy of the latest Competition Success Review, which kept her quiet. Her face looked quite green, though.

The cd player in the car refused to play anything apart from a cd of Rehman's hits and the soundtrack of Kaante. We didn't mind, though - kept humming Chinna Chinna Aasai and Jaane Kya Hoga Raama Re right through the trip. The car didn't give any problems either, though it developed laryngitis after reaching Bangalore and now squeaks when I touch the horn.


Read the English translation of PK Balakrishnan's Ini Njan Urangatte at Kolenchery. The story is brilliant, but the translation by KC Sarasamma is an example of how not to translate novels. It contains the likes of "Krishna, you please come here" and "Arjuna, you please learn this", "What the devil do you mean doing this", gems like "Seeing this, the crowd went into a hurly burly" and my favourite, "Karna stood thoughtlessly in the mid-day sun". Serves me right for not reading the book in my native Malayalam.

Picked up Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code from the airport, en route to Mumbai. I haven't finished it yet, but formed my usual prejudiced opinion ten pages into the book. Its being pitched as an "intelligent thriller", which it isn't by any stretch of the imagination. Furthermore, Dan Brown can't write to save his life. You want an example of how to write extremely readable thrillers, read McBain, read King, read Leonard. Heck, read McLean. Brown describes situations from the point of view of almost every character in the book, thus making sure you don't root for any. All of them appear one dimensional and cliched, too.

The 'intelligent' part of the book is so dumbed down, its almost funny. A code as a simple anagram, another as a mirror inversion, a third that uses simple substitution, the Fibonacci series...whats so intelligent about all this ? To give Brown credit, the central idea of the book is quite breathtaking in its audacity. Which is the only reason I continued reading.


In other news, my paid account expired. No more madhav at livejournal dot com, no more fancy userpics. Oh, the sadness of it all.