What is effective storytelling

We are all storytellers. Whether it is the stories we tell our friends – of incidents where we were the protagonist or how we were appreciated for something at work – or the stories we tell ourselves – maybe I shouldn’t eat this extra roti because I need space for dessert – we love telling stories.

3 things on kindness I have learnt from my parents

My household has always been one where birthdays and celebrations have been bookended by donations – either to old age homes or orphanages. I still remember the yearly letter we used to get from Help Age India and how dad’s contribution had been used to help someone’s livelihood.

Not a book review: A Gentleman in Moscow

Do you ever just start a book because from the looks of it, you know it’ll be a slow read? And after reading 4 books in a span of 2 weeks, you’re suddenly craving a book that is not so much focussed on the plot and action but more on a single character and his life’s meanderings?

A day with a favourite author #BlogchatterBlogHop

When I did not understand the process of writing – or what a muse was, I remember thinking if I ever met one of my favourite authors, I would ask them where they got their ideas from. What inspired them and how the hell they wrote and created this tapestry only by using words and putting one word in front of the next.

A genre I don’t usually read #BlogchatterBlogHop

So any bookish post must begin with me showing off how many books I have finished reading and I’m happy to report I’m sitting at a comfortable 36 – that is 6 books more than my target and it makes me so damn proud that I’m reading again, like I used to a few years back.

Fly me to the moon #BlogchatterBlogHop

“Fly me to the moon
Let me play among the stars
Let me see what spring is like on a-Jupiter and Mars.”

The jazz song welcomed Krupa as she entered a building that was considered swanky in its better days. These days, it wasn’t home to offices where people in fancy clothes walked about, yelling into their phones, cracking spectacular deals. The rich, after all, had flown away in their expensive spacecrafts and ground-breaking technology. Technology that would allow them to reach the Moon or Mars in half the time than the usual three days or seven months.

If I had to choose… #BlogchatterBlogHop

If I had to choose between
reading or writing
I would choose you reading
For all the joy and solace I find with you
of discovering my next read
Like a kid in a candy store.

Not a book review: The Seas

I usually have very little patience for books like The Seas. From the blurb and the first chapter, I was expecting a book that would be self-indulgent, romanticize mental illness, have no plot and just meander through the pages, coming to an abrupt end like the author couldn’t be arsed to at least write a coherent ending.

The utilitarianism of violence and other things that puzzle me #BlogchatterBlogHop

Here are 4 things about today’s world that puzzle me [yup I’m just directly going to start]:

• Who runs the world?

Whenever I watched Game of Thrones, the one thing that always stood out to me was how little the people who were fighting to rule Westeros and sit on the iron throne cared about the actual people. I would wonder why they wanted to rule when they didn’t care about anything beyond the need to possess that throne.

I have devised a cunning plan #BlogchatterBlogHop

When I was in school, we had to make journals as part of our board exams requirement. They were 20 easy marks to add to our science subjects and almost everyone put in the considerable effort of asking for favours, getting their mothers/sisters onboard to do the diagrams or to write the material so the examiners would have no chance of deducting any marks.