The Big Book Blog

                    More often than not we find Indian authors being thrown into oblivion to make way for their international counterparts. Our childhood was mostly Enid Blyton and Nancy Drew rather than Sudha Murthy. But there had always been authors from the Indian subcontinent who had immensely breathtaking stories to share. Authors from our neighborhood had to take a hard road towards popularity, appreciation, and acceptance from around the globe. On account of that, the book club had a session named  'Desi Tadka', fully devoted to Indian writers and their writing style. We began with The Chetan Bhagat genre - filmy writing style and moved backward to Khushwant Singh, R K Narayan, Arundhati Roy, and Kamala Das, who had more serious themes.  There was also a short audio story session, where we listened to 'Khol Do', a very breathtaking short story by Sadat Hasan Mantro. The audio storytelling style is one with which most are not familiar with. But the impact tha

Books and movies are my two loves. They open up a world of  imagination and storytelling. To me, book-to-movie is a literary form of art. Books and movies are two different medium. Books are verbal and use words to tell a story where films are visual and rely on the images to do the telling. ‘Which is better- books or movies?’ is an age old debate topic. As a person who loves to read books and watch movies, I have always felt that reading books is much better than watching movies. Reading books let you imagine the settings and incidents. It brings out the creativity in you. On the other hand movies skip out the details in book. Books will always be the best, but there are a few movies that take the cake compared to the text. From my personal experience, most book to movie adaptations tend to fall short in a lot of areas and take enormous creative liberties. However that being said, the most important part in an adaptation of a book for me is that the movie has to capture

The desire to listen to stories were ever innate to human ears. Man, being a social animal, has always been interested in the whereabouts of the person next to them- experiences, trivial and incidental; made up fictions and truth; the unwrenched quest of a bearded traveler , to the top of a secret mountain and how yesterday Mr. Sam’s 102 years old grandmother made it back to life just in time.  I think this feature of man’s mind might have created the art of storytelling. A form that defined our oral traditions, were made legit into written records, into different genres that cherished our literature. One such genre, we took into our Book Club discussion was short stories. The short story as a genre, has been considered both an apprenticeship from preceding, more lengthy works, and a crafted form in its own right. It offers a single significant event to the readers, a minimalist  novel. It’s considered as a prose narrative “requiring from half an hour to one or two hours in it

You may say people don’t read anymore. I’ll say that, in fact, the number of bookworms on the block is much higher than it used to be till a few years ago. The reason – simply a mind-boggling diversity of genres! While some may love crime thrillers, others may go for romantic paperbacks. While someone may relish fantasy, another may pick self-help books. Divided by tastes, albeit, they’re all united by one identity- readers! Our idea was to bring together different kinds of readers on a ‘common, non-judgmental, optimistic’ platform (as we advertised it) and talk about books and beyond. That’s how we came up with ‘The Book Club’ at Central University of Tamil Nadu . It all started on a Tuesday evening when around six of us settled down on the steps outside the multipurpose auditorium to talk about the last book that each of us had read. One thing led to another and soon we had a list of good-reads from various different genres. When we talk about our favorite things, we ma