The Big Book Blog

  WEATHERING WITH YOU - Nikita For those who loved the anime movie Your Name, they will definitely fall for Weathering with you. Makoto Shinkai delivers another masterpiece with a simple teenage love story interlaced with fantasy. It’s a love story ofa high-school runaway, Hadako, who heads to Tokyo to start over and an orphan, Hina who is doing anything she can to support herself and her brother so as to not get thrown into the system and get separated. Both of them meet in a chance encounter, offer each other kindness when it was least expected and henceforth started a domino effect of incidents through which they fall in love, amidst the backdrop of heavy rain, misery and catastrophe. In the vast expanse of sky filled with angry clouds thundering, there’s a patch of clear sky, the sun beaming full of hope. Entranced by it, Hina enters the red torri gate, hands folded, praying and finds herself turned into a sunshine girl. Literally, a sunshine girl, who can change the weather. Wit

  The Adventures of Tintin - Madhubani My elementary school Bengali grammar book said that when we frame a sentence, it automatically forms an image in our mind. We usually find it easier to register information when it’s associated with an image. To put it in a nutshell, human expression finds its way through a combination of words and images. And what better way to put them together than a comic strip? I was ten when an uncle happened to be clearing out his closet and he gifted me the complete collection of The Adventures of Tintin which he had compiled all his life - a rare stroke of luck I must say! Growing up, I remember drawing comic strips of my own. I had watched Tintin on cartoon network before and when I started reading, I had little idea about how amazing a series it is . The Adventures of Tintin, created by Belgian cartoonist Georges Remi under the penname Herge, is one of the most popular Europian comics of the 20 th century. Driven by a taste for mystery, Tintin, a y

            Every land has a story to tell. Everybody is a story by themselves and it takes a good observer to ponder the less explored magnificent secrets of the lives we have seen. Author Manu S. Pillai, on that account, has succeeded in giving a very intense and descriptive narration of the history of Kerala, the lesser-known secrets of Travancore royal family, and the women who owned the throne.  The book Ivory Throne: Chronicles of the House of Travancore begins by introducing the history when Vasco da Gama set foot in Kerala. Travancore as the principal subject in the book begins with the rise of Martanda Varma. There is a brief narration of Ravi Varma’s growth as an artist, followed by the journey of Sethu Lakshmi Bayi and her cousin Sethu Parvathi Bayi (granddaughters of Raja Ravi Varma), who were adopted by the royal family to become senior and junior maharanis respectively, in order to continue the royal lineage as per Kerala’s matrilineal society.                     

As soon as the alarm rang, I jumped out of my bed and rushed to the bathroom, ransacking my shelves and cupboard to get hold of my toothpaste, toothbrush, and a towel. Being a nocturnal creature, it had always been a big struggle for me to get up early and reach class on time. On top of it, on Fridays we are scheduled to perform physical chemistry laboratory activities, where we are supposed to fall in at 10 in the morning, handled by one of the most sincere faculties in the department who is high on punctuality. So, Fridays I have no other choice than to skip breakfast. As usual, I managed to get into a group of most intellectual fellow beings of the class, expecting that it would alleviate the workload on my head, while we perform experiments. Today, we were asked to perform conductometric titration to determine............................... Wait! This would have been the lines in my diary if things happened as planned few months back. But alas! Everyone who is reading this at the m

What really is a classic? A classic is a noteworthy book of its time which has managed to transcend timelines to reach readers of today. You must have heard the names Shakespeare, Dickens, Austen, Tolstoy or Hugo too much so that you think they are overrated and you are probably bored by their very names. Then why read classics? 1. Timeless tales. No matter how many years and centuries have gone past. The only real reason why we keep reading classics is to be assured that human beings have always been the same from inside. The circumstances may have been different but the struggles have always been the same. Italo Calvino in his famous 1980s essay called a classic "a book that has never finished saying what it has to say" If only you understood why you felt flashes of sympathy for Heathcliff even in the later parts of ‘The Wuthering Heights’? If only you see why you could not bear the miseries of David Copperfield. The way you can still relate to characters belongin

"The woman is perfected.    Her dead Body wears the smile of accomplishment,    The illusion of a Greek necessity Flows in the scrolls of her toga,    Her bare Feet seem to be saying: We have come so far, it is over." Even though debatable, these are the lines from the last poem, 'Edge' of the great American poet Sylvia Plath. The poem is about a dead woman who is perfected in her death and ironically just after 6 days of writing this poem, Sylvia Plath committed suicide. She is a poet who never wrote for her readers. Rather all her poems were her mind, her voice that echoed in her pen. Being a patient of chronic depression, all her works carried the sorrows and emotions she was fighting with. Plath's last poem too heated with her thick feelings bears the pain of her crying inner self. A poet who marked lines for her own, she was not much celebrated in her lifetime. Rather, through death, she was raised in the wings of her depresse