That Adiga Guy Got Lucky!

Done reading The White Tiger, which surprisingly enough was this year's Booker winner. It's a well-written, evenly-paced story, but the only thing according to me that worked for the non-Indian jury would be that it presents a fairly non-exotic and unusual (for present times) picture of India. Now, this might be a novel novel for them, but for most Indians this would be like reading what they see everyday, something that hardly deserves wasting 300-odd pages on.

What I liked about the book is that unlike most Indian fiction that I know of, the protagonist here is a criminal, with little conscience, and no regret for his crime. He becomes a rich man, mainly because of his entrepreneurship and buckets of good luck, but partly because he decided to take the first step towards that crime.

There's little else in the book that can place it on the same shelf that some of the other Booker winners - The God of Small Things, Midnight's Children, The Blind Assassin, Possession: A Romance, Disgrace and a few others occupy. In style, but also in terms of the way it relies on providence to make things move, its closest cousin could be Q&A by Vikas Swarup. The latter was also a fairly fast-paced decent read, but just another page-turner to be read during, and not much thought about after, a train/bus/plane journey.

A similar feeling of pointlessness was experienced while watching Welcome to Sajjanpur a couple of days back. Possibly one of Benegal's worst movies.

I got original DVDs of Ghajini, Ghilli and Aayitha Ezhuthu from a friend at work today. After recent viewings of Sivaji and Dasavatharam, I have realized that there is definitely sense in watching South Indian movies in the language they are made in if one wants to derive the most pleasure from them, instead of watching remade/dubbed versions. I can't do without subtitles unfortunately or would have done that too.

I realized today that I can't go home or to my cousin's place for Diwali without missing work. That is one thing about being in Bangalore that sucks. I'll probably end up spending the three-day long weekend reading novels and watching inane flicks.

Which might not be a wholly bad thing considering that I have some hectic work-related traveling planned for the near future.