KhepiAri

Book Review: The Missing Queen by Samhita Arni Quote: Kaikeyi leans close to me. She reeks of tobacco. I can feel her hot, fetid breath on my skin. 'What's her story? That's a story that the loyal citizens of Ayodhya and your puppet newspaper may have trouble swallowing'. A nameless TV journalist, dares to do the impossible, on national television, she asks 'Where is Sita?' From then on the cat and mouse game of seeking the truth begins. Set in the city-state where Ram is the beloved king who is trying to bring Democracy. Ayodhya is an ever-growing kingdom that ate up Lanka's resources after defeating Ravan. In its omnivorous quest to be the shining example of development, many have been trampled. Our journalist keeps discovering secrets and ends up connecting dots to the other side of the story. From queen to princess she meets them all in her search for Sita. The book begins with Kaikeyi, within the first three pages I ...

Book Review: Embroideries by Marjane Satrapi Quote: I asked him what his work was. He answered that he devoted all his time to his political activities... He was undoubtedly busy with the diplomatic relations between his testicles and women's breast. In an elegant room, there is a gathering of women who after lunch have put their husbands to siesta, Marjane Satrapi then in her twenties is witnessing gossip unfold while she serves tea to her grandmother's friends. Soon she learns of stories of sex, love, betrayal and jokes.  Her grandmother a woman I fell in love with in Persepolis, is admirable and scary, and fierce. A woman who has no place for weak-willed, opium addict and thrice-married. An entire book is an act of retelling, now minus the sombre part of their lives. Grandmother recalls how she tried to help a friend fake her virginity on the wedding night and how it turned into a horribly-funny story. Another woman tells how her parents ...

Every year the goddess with ten hands comes to visit the tribe called Bongalies. A tribe spread all over the world, loves eating sweets, fish, rice, and words. The goddess comes as daughter leaves as the mother brings a lot of emotions and excitement in the B genes. With her comes the headache of shopping and pandal hopping. None of which yours truly enjoys. Not only the goddess visits her family, she brings her children, her pet, and her children’s pet. My house is quite the human representation of that divine family. Our mother is as ferocious as the goddess, willing to kill and bite and rip for her children, flowers and pets’ sake. She has two daughters one who loves, let’s say anything related to material possession. Another who believes in burying herself in fiction to avoid public interaction. Again, my mom’s elder daughter has a handsome and short-tempered son-in-law who fills the vacancy of goddess’ war faring son. My mother doesn’t have a lion, but a Persian ...

First time I saw a mannequin is a memory lost in the Ocean. My major encounter with one happened when I was around seven. I was visiting my paternal home during summer vacation, on one particular horrible summer day my family had decided to go shopping. That was where I met a doll that was my size and wearing a metallic brown skirt, I fell in love with that skirt at first sight. Poor doll was also wearing a bottle green sleeveless tee, the greedy me desired that too. Shopkeepers found me exact copy-paste of the brown skirt, but when it came to the tee, they didn’t have another in stock. They bought me white full sleeved white shirt with red flowers, a yellow collared shirt, a pink frilly blouse, but I wanted that bottle green tee. Meanwhile my sister, mom and dad had selected their clothes; I was still stuck on the green tee. My love for green has been dominant trait since childhood; those were first strikes of my green-insanity. I made the shopkeepers bent to my demand, ra...

Two days back, I picked up a paperback with a boy’s photograph as its cover. Never am I the children fan, but the boy’s face especially his eyes were apt for the cover as the title of the book is blueeyedboy. Its story of a forty-two-year-old man who writes murder fiction on a site called badguysrock.com, and he is also a murderer. Here lies Joanne Harris’s masterful use of narratives, multiple plot twists and the singularity in the goal of blueeyedboy’s mind, to kill his mother, rather his Ma. The book is an oedipal tale, here are three boys who love their Ma, but hate her equally. None of the boys’ escape her omnipresent sixth sense, each boy branded a colour black, brown and blue for sorting out laundry, they all resonate to their respective colour. ‘Blue’ being the special one, with his eyes blue and the youngest, he is most colonized by his ma. Hence at forty-two, he still lives with her. Throughout the story, the themes of incest run parallel, blueeyed...

Every day, health journals, newspapers, e-papers, magazines, blogs, micro-blogs, tumblr and infinite other portals publish pieces about physical well-being. The infamous The Awkward Yeti, has taken it upon himself to simplify the human body with art. In this age of acute health care system and personal development and hyper awareness about body, some humans take their bodies for granted, they would have been happier had medical science stuck to the treatment of humours. Let’s face the easy facts, exercise is tough, giving upon on post-sunrise sleep is hardest. Our generation may be, has the perfect balance between health conscious crazy mode and hardcore lazy mode. Yes, we wish that our weight count would drop with each new ‘like’ increase on our Facebook post. Again the truth is, we have to drag our minds and butts too fix this lacuna in our mood swings. We might eat the street food, but we try to balance it out with green tea. Our generation is the dough that gets knea...

February tickles in and the new year spirit leaves us with the gloomy bloom. It’s the month of love or in other words the most profitable month for the card makers, soft toy sellers and restaurants. Love either overflows or dries a human heart for first fifteen days of this small month. I who am in love with the idea of love finds imaginary wings growing out from my toes in this month. For years now my friends and I we have been gifting each other chocolates on valentine’s day. We can blame this flaw of ours easily on the Japanese and Korean rom-coms we grew up watching. My once walking mate and now my partner in quest of  self love, turns into over-feminized creatures in this month with me.  Valentine’s day is a big event in the life of loveless. By loveless I simply mean the love that comes from a lover. My family is strictly forbidden to enter my non-existent love life and express their suffocating love to me to counter my loveless comment. I love wearing red on...

Every time I walk inside Kolkata’s New Market, I feel like Alice in wonderland. There are bags, shoes, junk jewelries, food and most importantly an exhibition of funky under garments. Here are these men standing out with their blushes, bluntness and brutish looks, selling brassieres, camisoles, boy-shots, stockings of unimaginable colours, materials and patterns. With every visit, I stalk them, I have this acute desire to grab those cute creations and cuddle them to my heart's content. But till this date I have been too shy, lazy and in-doubt about buying those inexpensive cups of desire and I blame it on the elitist shopaholic gene that dominates me. My father had induced in me the idea of expensive clothes being best for our body and my mother and sister too believe in the same faith. A year back on one such shopping spree, when I was dazzled by the weapons of mass destruction upturned, hanging and giggling at twilight, my sister pulled me insid...

(Happy belated New Year! and the first blog post should begin with Twisted Tales)  I have decided to draw my own images as googling is time consuming & I am not an artist. Best thing about sudden vacations is, people can take small trips to rejuvenate their scrambled and scattered spirits. When these battered creatures get magical three days to escape university, they whoosh past their backpacks and run home to re-nourish their starved body and souls. While some vacations are gift from the divine, some vacations come into life of people as double edged swords. Instead of rejuvenating to glorious beauty, one ends up being errand boy, a job that befalls with birth under right stars on wrong night. One particular battered soul, decides that expensive unhealthy junk food is a must for the system after living on green tea and hot-chocolate diet for a month, when the news of sudden vacation breaks out. This particular creature could never escape the all reaching...