Daadu Dolma, the sweet old man that Mishki and Pushka meet on their visit to Earth from their home planet Zoomba is keen to show them the wonderful places in India.
Mishki and Pushka are very curious because they don’t know much about the state they are about to visit. “Well, you could say that Haryana is where a lot of India’s history was born. Some of the greatest events in Indian history occurred here,” explains Daadu.
Here are four things they learn about Haryana.
Meet the Unlikely Detectives of the Happy Home for the Aged
The tranquility of the Happy Home for the Aged is shattered when a body is found hanging in the garden. The inhabitants of the home are at first perplexed, and then decide to come together to solve the murder that has suddenly brought the violence of the world into their Goan arcadia. Each of them bring different skills to the task of unravelling the crime.
Patiently, and with flashes of inspiration, the unlikely detectives follow the clues and emerge from the isolated and separate worlds they had inhabited for so long.
Let us meet these characters from Bulbul Sharma’s mystery book, Murder at the Happy Home for the Aged.
Our Impossible Love by Durjoy Datta – An Excerpt
Aisha, a late bloomer, has to figure out what it means to be a woman and to be desired. Danish feels time is running out for him and he’s going to end up as a nobody, as opposed to his overachieving, determined younger brother. Life takes a strange turn when Danish, the confused idiot, is appointed as the student counsellor to Aisha. Between the two of them they have to figure out love, life, friendship-most of all, themselves.
Our Impossible Love written by the bestselling author, Durjoy Datta presents, a story that showcases Life the way it is and Love the way it should be.
Let’s read an excerpt from this book.
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Danish Roy
They keep telling you, you’re unique, you’re different, you have a calling, a talent, a miracle inside of you. I had bought into this theory for a really long time. But no more. I was ordinary and there was no point waiting for that hidden genius in me to bubble to the surface. I would not discover my yet unexplored talent for painting, or interpreting ancient languages, or being a horse whisperer, or interpreting foreign policy at thirty.
And I think I would have been okay with it, or at least as okay as everyone else is with their ordinariness, had it not been for my overachieving little brother, my parents’ favourite, who was wrecking corporate hierarchies like he was born to do so. Only last year, he got into the top 30 under 30 (at 21) in Forbes magazine for being a start-up prodigy. Fresh out of IIT Delhi, his crazy idea of sending high packets of data over Bluetooth in a matter of seconds sent potential investors in a tizzy. He was always in a tie-suit now, carrying leather folders and taking late night flights to meetings where capital flow, structural accounting and other terrifying things are discussed.
I’m two years older than him and I hadn’t even won a spoon race in my life.
Quite understandably, I was a bit of an embarrassment to my parents—my father was a high-ranking official in the education ministry, and my mother, a tenured physics lecturer at Delhi University. It’s not that they didn’t love me, of course they did, but it was only because I was their son and they were programmed to love me more than themselves. But yeah, they loved Ankit more, and I didn’t blame them.
Even I loved him more.
I was still struggling to complete my graduation in psychology (a subject my parents had chosen for me) from a college no one knew about, including the government, I presume. I was twenty-three and I had never been employed, a situation that didn’t look like would change in the near future. It was more likely I would flunk my final exams too. Flunking exams by ridiculous margins was my superpower!
I was the most self-aware dumb person I had ever met.
Throw me a Suduko and you could study human behaviour in hostage situations. Medieval torture had nothing on me but keep a mathematics exam paper in front of me and I would start shitting bricks.
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4 Things You Should Know About Abhinav Chandrachud
Abhinav Chandrachud is an advocate at the Bombay High court. He has written extensively on subjects like the freedom of speech, the judiciary, the constitution of India and legal history.
Chandrachud’s latest book, Supreme Whispers: Conversations with Judges of the Supreme Court of India 1980-1989, sheds light on a decade of politics, decision-making and legal culture in the Supreme Court of India. This book yields a fascinating glimpse into the secluded world of the judges of the Supreme Court in the 1980s and earlier.
Here are 4 things you didn’t know about the author:
Are you Maya or Renu?
5 Reasons Why Bhutan Should be your Next Travel Destination
A country of pristine forests and flower, dotted with imposing fortresses and serene monasteries, Bhutan has captured the world’s imagination not only with its beauty but also with its unique philosophy of governance, which measures the country’s progress and development through gross national happiness rather than gross domestic product. Ashi Dorji Wangmo Wangchuck’s portrait Treasures of the Thunder Dragon is a captivating blend of personal memoir, history, folklore and travelogue. It provides intimate insights into Bhutanese culture and society and vivid glimpses of life in its villages, monasteries and palaces.
The author also reveals Bhutan’s ‘hidden treasures’, discovered during her arduous journeys on foot to the remotest corners of her country, from obscure highland hamlets in the shadow of great Himalayan peaks to rainforests that are among the world’s richest biodiversity hotspots.
Here are 5 reasons why you should visit Bhutan this summer:
5 Beautiful Malayalam Words with Profound Meanings
Most linguists believe that every language has a few untranslatable words that make language in question, unique. Untranslatable words don’t mean that these words can’t be translated from one language to another but that part of the essence of the word is lost as it crosses from one language to another.This often is due to different social and cultural contexts that have shaped how the word is used.
K.R. Meera is one of the bestselling authors in Malayalam Literature and her latest book, The Unseeing Idol of Light, initially written in Malayalam has been translated into English.
Here are 5 Malayalam words that don’t directly translate to English but have profound meanings.
Quotes from Anne Frank that You Must Know
In Amsterdam, in the summer of 1942, the Nazis forced teenager Anne Frank and her family into hiding. For over two years, they, another family and a German dentist lived in a ‘secret annexe’, fearing discovery. All that time, Anne kept a diary. Here she writes about her curiosity of her emerging sexuality, the conflicts with her mother, her passion for Peter, a boy whose family hid with hers, and her acute portraits of her fellow prisoners.
Since its publication in 1947, Anne Frank’s diary has been read by tens of millions of people. In it, we find some inspiring quotes.
Prison Days – An Excerpt
AGYEYA (1911–87) was the pen name of S.H. Vatsyayan, one of the foremost figures of Hindi literature who was instrumental in pioneering modern trends in the realm of poetry, fiction, criticism and journalism. He was jailed as a revolutionary by the British authorities in the early 1930s – an experience that indelibly shaped his literary output.
Written between 1933 and 1938, Prison Days and Other Poems astutely captures the mood before Indian independence, when freedom was still merely a dream. The verses in Prison Days vividly conjure the horror and tedium of imprisonment. But Agyeya’s vision never descends into bleakness. Even quarantined, he is constantly aware of the pulse of life radiating outside the prison walls.
Here is an excerpt from the foreword of Prison Days and Other Poems, by Jawaharlal Nehru.
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For many months I have had the manuscript of these poems with me, a constant reminder to me of my promise to write a few lines as a foreword. And yet I have found it strangely difficult to write this foreword, although I have done a great deal of writing on all manner of subjects during this period. I am no judge or critic of poetry and so I hesitated, but I love poetry and some of these little poems have appealed to me greatly. They have stuck in my mind and brought back to me memories of prison days and that strange and haunted world where men, whom society had branded as criminals and cast out of its pale, loved their narrow circumscribed lives. There were men there who had been involved in a killing, men known as dacoits and thieves, but all of us were bound together in that sorrow-laden world of prison, between us there existed a kinship of spirit. In the lonely chambers which were our cells, we walked up and down, five measured paces this way, and five measured paces back, and communed with sorrow. We found friendship and companionship and refuge in thought and on the magic carpet of fantasy we fled away from our surroundings. We lived double lives—the life of the prison, ordered and circumscribed, bolted and barred, and the free life of the spirit, with its dreams and visions, hopes and desires.
Something of that dreaming comes out in these poems, something of that yearning when the arms stretched out in search of what was not and clutched at empty space. Something also of the peace and contentment that we managed to extract even in our loneliness in that house of sorrow. There was always a tomorrow to hope for, a tomorrow which might bring deliverance.
And so I commend these poems and perhaps they might move others, as they have moved me.
5 Things every Long-Distance Couple will relate to
Sudeep Nagarkar’s book, All Rights Reserved For You, is a heart-warming real-life story of a couple who is separated by distance. While reading this book, we came across five things that every long distance couple will absolutely relate to. Scroll below to check them out!
