Sheila Kumar - Comfortably Numb

Comfortably Numb

Sheila Kumar's Storehouse

Book review: Harry Potter and the Cursed Child by J K Rowling, John Tiffany and Jack Thorne

As the breathless blurbs go: he’s back! After 19 years! And so are Ron and Hermione! And Hagrid, Snape, Cedric Diggory and Dumbledore, (don’t ask), Moaning Myrtle and oh, quite a few of the Hogwarts lot we have come to know and like. It’s a new adventure, it contains all the requisite dangers, and…

Feature: Unlikely Friendships

You two are friends? Really? Go on, admit it. Somewhere in your list of ‘closer than this’ friends, in the ‘inner circle’ or on its fringe, is this person who is really, really, really not like you, not one bit. You don’t share the same tastes; you are on different pages when it comes to…

Book review: One Last Drink at Guapa by Saleem Haddad

If being gay is complicated, being gay in West Asia is even more so. This book is an ode to disillusionment — personal, political, national — yet written in prose that soars and tugs at the emotions. Haddad’s hero Rasa is back in his unnamed country after doing his undergraduate studies in the U.S., full…

Book review: The Road to Little Dribbling by Bill Bryson

This is more a brief take than review. Twenty years after he wrote the definitive book on Great Britain, Notes From A Small Island, purportedly the most successful travel book ever( 2.5 million copies sold to date), Bill Bryson is back, funny bone a-tingling, pen and notebook in hand, keen powers of observation intact. But…

Book review: Love, Loss and What We Ate by Padma Lakshmi

A tasteful tell-all If Padma Lakshmi’s memoir is more memory and less food, it does not matter. Warmth and honesty infuses this candid account of her life and times; it is, quite literally, an answer to everything you wanted to know about her but didn’t know who to ask. As the whole reading world…

Book review: Eligible by Curtis Sittenfeld

Eligible: A Biased Review Eligible is American author Curtis Sittenfeld’s re-telling of that much loved classic Pride and Prejudice. To take on a work, any work of Jane Austen (even when commissioned to do so, as part of the Austen Project) is one brave thing to do, and inevitably, for every two people who liked Eligible, four…

Book review: The Ivory Throne by Manu S Pillai

Pride and prejudice Once upon a time in god`s own country, there lived two cousins. Plucked from their peaceful childhood home in their preteens, they were adopted by a royal house and soon enough became the senior and the junior maharanis. Eventually, they married and the race to produce the next ruler of the house…

Feature: Where has nuance gone?

Where has nuance gone? t`s a bad time to be a whiter shade of pale. Or lavender, mauve, mint, teal, chartreuse…. Actually, it`s a bad time to be subtle. To fall back on irony and expect the listener/viewer/observer to get just what you mean. This was brought home sharply vis-à-vis a recent post I shared on…

Book review: Mythbreaker, Kiran Mazumdar Shaw and the Story of Indian Biotech by Seema Singh

This well-written biography with its catchy title, gives readers a cogent answer to the question, who is Kiran Mazumdar Shaw, as well as its corollary, what is Biocon all about. Actually, it leans more towards tracking of the business rather than delving too deeply into the personality traits of its founder but then, the…

Book review: Chillies and Porridge, Writing Food, edited by Mita Kapur

Undercooked Fare Chillies and Porridge (Edited by Mita Kapur) has an interesting if rather crowded jacket picture. A line-up of accomplished writers. A winner of a topic for an anthology: food. Chillies and Porridge should have made for truly delicious reading. And some of it does, but only some. Janice Pariat`s reflective eulogy to a breakfast…