The Greatest Bengali Stories Ever Told contains 21 short stories spanning more than a century of Bengali fiction. Whether these are the ‘greatest Bengali stories ever’, however, is a question with no easy answer.
In The Wedding Photographer by Sakshama Puri Dhariwal, when wedding photographer Risha Kohli sits next to handsome young tycoon Arjun Khanna on a flight, sparks fly. Buy this smart, sassy, sexy novel here. Hour 3 Risha plugged her memory card into her laptop, grumbling to herself. Nidhi called this her ‘post-partum depression phase’, sifting through thousands of photos for the first cut selection. Unlike traditional wedding photographers, Risha didn’t believe in sending her clients thousands of photos to choose from. She spent a substantial amount of time on a thorough quality check. She painstakingly looked through each image, discarding the ones with poor lighting or resolution, cluttered frames and, most importantly, the non-candid images or ‘posers’. Most clients had a regular photographer to cater to requests such as ‘Hamare kitty party group ki ek photo lena’; they didn’t need Risha for that. Risha gulped down her lukewarm coffee, and started with the obvious thumbnails. Select, delete. Select, delete. If Risha ever quit her job to do photography full time, the first thing she would do would be to hire an assistant for this specific task. She loved taking photos and even enjoyed working on the album design, but the tedium…
Go watch the movie The Man Who Knew Infinity if you must – it’s sure to be at least as entertaining as The Imitation Game or A Beautiful Mind. But do read the book – you won’t regret it, and it’s likely to stay with you long after the popcorn is over.
The following are two excerpts from the book A Half-Baked Love Story. (Buy A Half-Baked Love Story at the best price here.) 2 July 2008. It was the first day at my new school. I had scored ‘pretty average’ marks in my secondary school exams. Well, 88.7 per cent was considered a ‘pretty average’ score in my family. But I had to change my school as my father wanted me to study in a reputed institution. So I was dragged away from my friends. That day, I felt like a primary school kid, unwillingly sent to an alien place. I had reached school in time so as to make a good impression on the teachers on my first day. I was missing my previous school and friends terribly. To make matters worse for me, I had taken up the sciences. Everything was making me anxious. I felt an urge to run away. I wasn’t really sociable, so I couldn’t gather the courage to introduce myself and make friends with the people around me. What if they say, ‘No, we can’t be friends with you’? I felt they should have been courteous enough to help me feel comfortable on my first…
A children’s grammar book disguised as a story book… or the other way around! Squiggle is a doodle. She falls into a dictionary, meets a grammatically-challenged doodle called Doodle Dude, and proceeds to teach him to speak correct English.
Parenting in the Age of Facebook is about how the average hapless parent can pretend to be on top of this whole information-at-the-touch-of-a-button thing. How they can avoid their net-savvy offspring’s pity/scorn/amazement/ridicule when those little snots realise that they themselves are way ahead than their parents.
The Jaipur Literature Festival 2016 was a 5-day literary extravaganza which not only involved writers, but people from all spheres of life, be it media, cinema, politics, art or business. The common objective was to have a dialogue, exchange of ideas, of experiences and meeting their other half – the readers.
Publisher: Aleph Book Company
Year: 2014
ISBN: 9789382277637
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The First Firangis by Jonathan Gil Harris is a collection of stories about Westerners who arrived in India before British colonisation had taken over, and who assimilated themselves into the Indian landscape, becoming ‘Indian’ as they did so.
Author: Sudha Murty
Publisher: Penguin Books India
Year: 2014
ISBN: 9780143422259
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The Mother I Never Knew contains 2 novellas about men searching for mothers they never knew they had.
Author: R.K. Narayan, Illustrated by Lavanya Naidu
Publisher: Penguin Books India
Year: 2014
ISBN: 9780143333258
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Malgudi Schooldays is a new, illustrated edition of Swami and Friends, meant to appeal to younger children.