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I picked up this book thinking it to be another chick lit and when I asked my librarian if he would recommend it, he said, you would have to know a bit of Tamil to understand it. I said, well ok, I do know a bit of Tamil..but only a bit, and I took it.
And it’s been one crazy and joyous ride from page 1. Let me tell you, this book is absolutely crazy in a delicious and charming way and I wish I could make the last person who read my novel read it. She said my novel was too localized. What would she say if she came across the ‘ada dai’ and ‘thambi’s in it, I have no idea.
There are moments where some of the events seem to spin out of control and exaggeration is a very small word for it. But they go in context with the rest of the book and its a fabulous read. Having said that, let me clarify that I haven’t finished reading it yet.
The tenuous story takes you into the lives of a fatuous Brahmin casteist professor, his obese son, chick of a daughter, and the lives of another Brahmin boy who has fallen in love with a Dalit girl. Their lives are entwined through various manipulations which would have made the screenplay writer of a Hindi blockbuster quite ashamed of his skills. But the fact remains that everyone is connected everywhere. And the best part is that the author lets you connect the dots in stead of doing it for you.
The issues raised in this humourous book are aplenty – casteism, TamBrams, their obsession with purity, dalits and all this is interspersed with a healthy dose of Chennai university politics. Have I intrigued you enough? Go grab a copy!
Need I say any more?
My little darlings
Please say mashallah!!! 
After Atifa’s wedding was over, and we were waiting for everything to wind up….
Azhaan and Zoha
God, I almost fell asleep waiting for this picture to get uploaded. Anyway, I’m off to sleep and once I get some more pics, I’ll upload them here!
Good night people!
People! What a hectic weekend this was! My cousin Atifa got married today and the functions started from Friday and I haven’t had a decent night’s sleep since then! This much awaited wedding got over today finally and the valima is in Chennai on Thursday. Glad to have a break before more festivities! Whew! Saboor as usual was hardly to be seen, busy with other kids, running around creating hell, and his cheeks get so flushed and red, he reminds me a bit of the baby he used to be! Azhaan as usual stuck to me most of the time and right now, I’m just going to crash! Have a great week guys!
Anantha and I met over Chemistry practicals in college, back when I was a Science student still unsure of my future. Because our names were close alphabetically we ended up standing together during tedious practicals over noxious fumes of HCL and other acids. I remember, Anantha always used to get the titration experiments right, and me…I was just too careless and would sometimes copy her results and hope that the teacher wouldn’t notice. 
Well, back to her. I moved around with a very big set of friends in PUC and most of them were not that well acquainted with Anantha. So it just happened that she was my friend, but not part of my friend group, but that didn’t really make much difference either way. We just hit off really well for some reason( I was just half as studious as her) butafter PUC, she moved to Mount Carmel College for her degree while I stayed on in JNC. We kept in touch on and off and then I got married and she moved off to the US after college. That was in 1998.
She used to call me sometimes from there and we would talk and talk and then Saboor was born and I didn’t have much time for long chats on the phone(no mobiles in those days, not with us at least). I slowly lost touch with her completely and then suddenly in 2003, I remembered that it had been ages since I had heard from her. I had lost her phone number and I had no idea how to find her. Back then I was not very internet savvy so it seemed like a miracle for me to find her through google. Apparently, she had submitted a research paper in the US and it was listed in Google.
Then I got her email ID from there and emailed her and found out that she was in Bangalore for a holiday at that very time! We decided to meet up at Coffee Day in MG Road and we met there briefly. I was taken aback by how much she had changed. There was the accent to start with, but what struck me was that she had metamorphosed into someone who wasn’t just a bookworm, but someone who had started taking care of her appearance too. She had become positively stunning! But the best part was that beneath all that, she was the same old Anantha whom I could connect with.
We again lost touch after that, but found each other through Orkut again. After that it was just the usual exchanges of scraps and mails and then she contacted me that she would be in Bangalore in December. We planned to meet up and I met her on 24th which was incidentally her birthday too. She was shopping with her sister and her brother in law and their twins, charming little babies who were absolutely gorgeous…half Indian, half American with grey eyes and everything!
We went to have lunch at Karavalli and that’s where this picture was taken.
Me and Anantha
Anantha and her niece Shanti
I had a wonderful time with Anantha and her family and hope I meet her again when she comes to India whenever that is!
