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Weekend Reads: What I am Reading & Watching This Weekend. (Mini-Reviews)

 Hello Loves! 

How is this weekend treating you? 

Mine is going quite well.

I am hoping this will be a weekend full of reading. 


The Women Who Forgot to Invent Facebook and Other Stories by Nisha Susan: A classical musician finds a prince in a chat room. Three dancers in Kochi mastermind their sex lives over email. A young wife in Mumbai becomes obsessed with a dead woman’s online relics. Strange (and familiar) troll wars drag at a writer’s peace of mind. Her daughter’s cellphone conversations deeply worry a cook in Delhi. A young mother finds a job monitoring disturbing content for a social media company.

The stories in this dazzling debut collection tap into the rich vein of love, violence and intimacy that technology, particularly the Internet, has brought to the lives of Indians over the last two decades. Two decades that transformed India’s digital landscape, where would-be lovers went from cooing into cordless phones to swiping right on cellphones. 

Whimsical in its telling and brutal in its probing of the human mind, these stories breathe unexpected life into the dark and joyful corners of a country learning to relish and resist globalisation.

Review: I just finished reading this book this morning. A collection of short stories centred around mostly women and some oddball and flawed and very real people. These stories have a manic energy running through them. Stories about best friends, sociopaths, a new wife obsessed with her husband's dead wife, a singer and a prince and several people in between. 

This book had come highly recommended by several people and almost everyone seemed to have loved this book, so I went in with my hopes very very high. 

For most part this book met my expectations. 

It just didn't exceed them. 

It's a classic case of I liked it but didn't love it. 

Nice enough and perfectly readable and full of people and situations that are entirely relatable and mirroring our modern city lives. 

Also, a huge chunk of these stories were set in Bangalore which just made me so happy. 

Rating: 3.5/5 



Next up I will pick something from the books above. 

My Kindle is full of books, I just need to pick something to sink my teeth in. 

I might also go back to my Feluda Stories and spend some happy times and travel through these stories. 


Tandav: As for what I've watched this weekend, well already binged and done with, is Tandav. A new series on Prime Video. The series follows a student movement, a political party rife with corruption and an ambitious political scion's quest for the Prime Minister's seat. It is a very meh series. In spite of being chock-full of talent, this series' sloppy writing lets it down! I had higher hopes given it's starcast but overall this series left a lot to be desired. It could have been so much better. But it's worth a watch if you have nothing else going on. It's timepass. 

If you want to watch a much better movie on youth politics and politics in general, then Mani Rathnam's Yuva is a much, much, much better watch! 

 

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