The Big Book Blog

            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