Coffee, dampness and rain

A mug of coffee sits by my side,
it's arm holding its waist.
Filled halfway with my favourite nectar,
my elixir of life: a cup of coffee.

The sky's a dark gray,
a sign of happiness in my country.
I hold my arms to the side and close my eyes,
heavenward, I seek.

A damp smell fills my nose
and quick! Zeus is angry!
Thunder claps, bouncing with joy
and with the wind dance the trees.

Finally! The heaven begin to part
and the maker's diamonds fall,
the trees catch the harmless darts 
and I run to drink them all.

The parched land drinks it's ambrosia,
life springs within the ground.
Leaves turn their natural green;
the Earth's original inhabitants' lost gift has been found.
     

SPEAK by Laurie Halse Anderson

Recently, I read Laurie Halse Anderson's SPEAK, a depressing story about a girl named Melinda Sordino. The first day at Merryweather High and she was being ostracized altogether by all the social cliques for calling the cops during a senior party that summer. Melinda refuses to speak to anyone and unknowingly expresses her feelings in art. The rest of the story circles on the reason she called the cops and her struggle of trying to overcome her trauma. The book is very funny at a few points and ridicules the absurdities of high school, social cliques and drama.

Quick Quotes Quill:
“It's easier not to say anything. Shut your trap, button your lip, can it. All that crap you hear on TV about communication and expressing feelings is a lie. Nobody really wants to hear what you have to say.”

“When people don't express themselves, they die one piece at a time. You'd be shocked at how many adults are really dead inside—walking through their days with no idea who they are, just waiting for a heart attack or cancer or a Mack truck to come along and finish the job. It's the saddest thing I know.” 

Pedestal Points:
- Many sentences in this book are no more than 5 words and are kept very very short. This beautifully emphasizes the fact that Melinda refuses to speak.

                                           

The Book Nook

Hey!

Are you a bibliophile looking for a variety of books to read? So am I! Henceforth, after every book I read, I'll be posting a summary/comment on it in a few lines. So be sure to read posts under the label 'The Book Nook' (labels on the right of the page) if you treasure books as much as I do!

                                            

-Nivetha

Welcome to the The Critique Zone

Hello everyone!
From now onwards, I'll be publishing all my movie reviews under the label 'The Critique Zone' and  I'm a rather good critique, if I've got to say so myself. If you are one of those people looking for an unbiased, perfect site that comments truthfully on the movie, be sure to visit this label found on the right of this page. Bye!

Interstellar - a story set among the stars.

I sure stuck gold when I got tickets to (in IMAX!) Christopher Nolan’s grandiloquent space epic, Interstellar (2014). Starring Matthew McConaughey, Anne Hathaway and Jessica Chastain, Interstellar is a brilliant story of both destruction and the ‘survival of the fittest’ in a harsh planet where resources are too sparse that decisions have to be made logically, excluding human emotions and feelings.

Now, let’s speed up the clocks for a while: in the future of Interstellar, Earth is ravaged by a blight that kills food crops and humanity, facing extinction, has to give up on all scientific endeavours and focus on growing the only crop left, corn, in the failing agrarian society. Cooper, a former NASA pilot and a widowed father of two now working as a cultivator of corn, identifies a gravitational anomaly in his 10-year-old daughter, Murphy’s room which she believes was caused by a ‘ghost’. In a sudden turn of events, Cooper, having parted on bad terms from Murph, is on a spaceship to a wormhole near Saturn which NASA believes was created by 5-dimensional ‘aliens’. He, along with biologist Amelia Brand, scientists Romilly and Doyle and robots CASE and TARS (whose humour level is annoyingly 100%), are to travel through the wormhole to the three, possibly-habitable, planets to which 3 scientists (Miller, Mann and Edmund) have been sent years  earlier for research and are currently on hypersleep (for a decade!). The rest of the plot is driven by discoveries, deceptions, dimensions and above all, dauntlessness.

Nolan, needless to say, is a grand master, a rare kind of Vinci in his movies. He has an impeccable knack of handling things, carving scenes in such perfection and wit that his audience neglect the answers that lay right before their eyes, which are busy analyzing things far away. Interstellar is another incredible epic of his. The sound effects, visuals and graphics are incredible. Unlike most directors who add either too much or too little effects to their movies, Nolan has added the right amount, enough to spice up the movie a bit. He has also relayed complicated astrophysics in the simplest way it could be put. Clearly, Nolan has put in a lot of effort in making this movie. One such example of this is when he made his assistant screenwriter, Jonathan Nolan study relativity at the California Institute of Technology to understand the science while writing the script, which took 4 years! I also have to congratulate McKenzie Foy on her remarkable acting, which, unlike many child actors, doesn’t seem forced and artificial.

Personally, I’m rather ecstatic that Nolan has created a movie set beyond Earth’s atmosphere, since beyond Earth lies a world of mysteries yet to be discovered and of beauty so ethereal that one can stare at it for centuries and still never not appreciate its beauty. Also, he reinforces a particular idea (and my most favourite) frequently in Interstellar: that Nature can be both beautiful and dangerous at the same time (in the same way the most vibrant fishes are the most dangerous ones). One such example of this is (spoiler alert!) when the astronauts are standing smack in the middle of the shallow ocean in Saturn (where water barely comes up to your knees) and see gigantic and majestic grey mountains in the distance...which turns out to be a single 10,000 foot wave. Sure, the sheer force of the wave is frightening and evil and yet, there is still a certain kind of beauty in it. The same applies to a black hole depicted as a hole with a glowing circumference.

Among all the movies I’ve ever watched, Interstellar has the lowest number of drawbacks. The only one concerns the science in the last part, which introduces a 5^th dimension (again, spoiler alert!) and talks about time as physical dimension, which is rather hard to fathom. I also felt that Nolan has left a few knots loose (why does the gravitational anomaly occur only in Murphy’s room?).

On the whole, Interstellar is a movie worth both your time and money (helps around with school a lot too).

                                                       

-Narayanan Nivetha

Beauty from beyond

Hello everyone!!! I went to Ooty on Muharram (4th Nov 2014) and took some wonderful close-ups of the simplest of things. I want these to express the beauty in the simplest of things: from the rich orange of a carrot to the electric blue of a wing of a bug to the glassy demeanor of morning dew.

The Secret Life of Bees

It is always said that a good book stays in your heart long after you’ve turned the pages, and ones like these come in very rare. I was very fortunate enough though, to stumble upon ‘The Secret Life of Bees’ by Sue Monk Kidd ‘one fine day’, even if it could be called a typical day. The Secret Life of Bees is a heart-touching book about racism, inequality, imperfection, female power and above all, the need for love for all living things, even a bee.

It’s the summer of 1964, the time when 14-year-old Lily Owens’s life is about to spin into a whole orbit. Lily’s life is shaped around the fuzzy memory of the afternoon her mother was killed, presumably by Lily herself. Everything changes when her black stand-in-mother, Rosaleen, pours snuff juice on the three deepest racial discriminators in Sylvan and Rosaleen is jailed. Hesitant at first, then desperate to free Rosaleen and herself from the clutches of a brutal and unfeeling father who makes her kneel on grits, Lily takes off, breaking Rosaleen out of jail, to Tiburon, S.C., the destination on the back of a picture of black Mary’s belonging to her mother. Fate leads her to an electric pink house with an equally eccentric trio of the black beekeeping sisters: August, May and June Boatwright. She is introduced to the breathtaking world of beekeeping, honey and Our Lady of Chains. She falls for the hum of bees, the gold of honey, the feel of the beekeeping veil, and most of all, the care she receives, especially having been starving for it her whole life. But will the honey last? Will she have to kneel on grits again? Will racism ever end?

The first thing that attracted me towards the book was its title. It was very funny - who would write a whole fictional book about the secret life of bees? Wouldn’t it be boring? Sue Monk can. Secondly, the description Sue gives of the bees’ and Lily’s lives are astonishing – the metaphors she uses, especially. She captures the perception of an adolescent wonderfully, the way Lily can be both mature and immature. She words the pain, pathos and self-doubt Lily has with excellent clarity too. My most favourite element of the book was the folklore that was used and how metaphorical it was to life, not to mention the quotes, my favourite being, “The hardest thing on earth is choosing what matters,” by August Boatwright. The book talks about divine female spirituality and their dignity and how we must find Our Lady of Chains in ourselves and not only in her statue.

On the contrary, there might’ve been downsides to the book. Firstly, the book dragged during Lily’s stay in the Boatwright sisters’ house and I found the main conflicts not very substantial. Sue Monk could’ve clearly distinguished the rising action and climax too. I also thought the ending was quite abrupt and formulaic. Throughout the book, it doesn’t take a wizard to find what happens next and the deposition is quite conventional.