The Undomestic Goddess: Time to slow down!

Reviewing a chiklit novel isn't exactly necessary because its sole purpose is to entertain you and keep you rolling with laughter. But I'm making an exception with this one...

I particularly love Sophie Kinsella's sense of humour ever since I read Confessions of a Shopaholic. I haven't read any of its sequels because I felt they would never match up to the excitement of the first one. So I picked up The Undomestic Goddess to get more of that genuine humour and particularly because the theme of this book itself is so hilarious.

Samantha Sweeting is a top notch lawyer in London. She's so busy that she literally has to remind herself to take a breath. She's addicted to her Blackberry and nothing can tear her away from work at law firm where she's spent five long years harbouring her dream of becoming a partner.

A disastrous event more or less ends her career as a lawyer and Samantha finds herself in the countryside at a mansion, being mistaken for a housekeeper. Samantha knows absolutely nothing about cooking, cleaning or ironing and her endeavours at fooling her already foolish employers is entertaining to the core.

Needless to say, there's a man too and this time it's a Mills&Boon type of dark, handsome, rugged hero who also happens to be the gardener.

But if you think the book's just about rolling in the grass and baking bread, think again. There is a real plot to the book as Samantha attempts to salvage her career at one point and faces some scandalizing truths.

The Undomestic Goddess is also about slowing down. In Samantha, working women will see bits of themselves trying to do too much without sparing a thought to their real dreams. With Samantha, it goes to the extreme but the lesson to be learnt is that it's good to take a break once in a while.

Kulfi hunting in Old Delhi

It was a picture of mouth-watering kulfis in the latest issue of Time Out that led me (and my better half who really hoped this was worth it!) to explore the bylanes of Old Delhi to locate the famous Kuremals kulfi wala. A metro ride to Chawri Bazaar led us to the chaotic Sita Ram market which we would have scoured up and down at least twice before being directed to one tiny bylane from among the numerous there. Walking down the isolated, though not completely empty, lane led us to the famous Kuremal's - shuttered down!


My first instinct was to call up the Time Out office and give them a piece of my mind as it was only 7.30 pm and the magazine said it was open up to 9 pm. Luckily, just opposite was the shop of Lala Dulli Chand Naresh Gupta, another renowned kulfi wala. The guy at the shop informed us that Kuremals has not been operating for a while now, and only works on special orders. What a pity!

Anyhow, we started off the thing we came for - stuffed mango kulfi. He gave us six sumptuous pieces of frozen mango filled with kesar kulfi and pistachio. It was the most unusual and amazing frozen dessert I have ever had! So much so, that in my excitement I forgot to photograph it! (As a result, I am putting up a pic of the kulfi courtesy eatanddust.wordpress.com)

We followed that by anaar kulfi (pomegranate) which was more of a gola, fruit cream (not as good as expected, a bit flavourless) and matka rabri kulfi (authentic to the core).

The shop also has faalsa kulfi, stuffed apple kulfi and litchi kulfi but we didn't try those out. Overall, the experience was good but I don't know whether I would go all the way again for it. And that's the point anyway...I wanted to visit this part of Delhi at least once...and it was worth it.

Aakriti vs Shanno

Two incidents in two schools happened recently, leading to the death of two girls. One died due to the alleged lack of medical attention and other, due to an alleged punishment that went too far. Both received due media attention but it is the first case which evoked the candlelight protests and visits from politicians.

Aakriti was a 17 year-old student of Modern school who died of an asthma attack, and her parents allege that it is the school's untimely response which killed her. The media hype was enough to have Sheila Dixit and Renuka Chowdhury visit Aakriti's parents. Now, the parents are planning to take the case to court.

On the other hand, Shanno was an 11 year-old child studying in a nondescript school who belonged to a poor family who could hardly make ends meet. She clearly died from brutal punishment at the hands of a teacher who has not even been implicated so far. No one has come to Shanno's aid, and no one is taking up her cause - forget candlelight protests. Not wanting to send her siblings to the same school, her parents have instead admitted them into an orphanage.

It's not that I blame Aakriti's parents for having the muscle to create a noise, but what happened is unfair. The poor girl's plight has no takers, except for 2-3 days that it received coverage. Her parents don't have the time or money to buy a place in media. They don't have visits from politicians to show for it. Most probably, the teacher/school authorities paid off the doctors and police to make Shanno's death look like an epileptic attack. Even if she did suffer from epilepsy, did the teacher not bring it on with her brutality? But nobody will answer these questions, because nobody's interested.

As for the other case, reports lead us to believe that the school did all it could to help Aakriti and most schools dont have a doctor on location. She was apparently ill before joining school and her parents could have taken extra precaution given her condition.

Whether it's media bias or a reflection of our own prejudiced society, we knwo how this goes. The poor man's daughter has no sympathizers but the rich man's daughter has plenty.

TOI falls for it!

The Times of India has fallen for an April Fools joke! On page 15 of the Delhi edition today, it published a report on navigator shoes (here's the link). This actually a joke, and here's the original site where people have already caught the trap in the various comments.

In fact, even the authenticity of the second piece of this page is debatable, about the touch screen phone for the blind!

Somehow this is not surprising. I am sure a lot of papers who don't believe in doing their research would have fallen for stories like this.

Here's a great list of all the jokes that were placed online yesterday. I personally like The Guardian's Twitter-only announcement, The Economist's theme park and Gmail's autopilot!

Revolutionary Road: For better....or the worst

You must watch Revolutionary Road with no preconceptions in mind, because what you will be taken through is something totally unlike what you could associate with America in the 1950s. For Americans, this era was the best time to be alive, to prosper and be happy with their families - stark contrast to the recession they face today.

So, we have a seemingly perfect family in the Wheelers - April (Kate Winslet) and Frank (Leonardo DiCaprio) and their two children. But things are not at all what they seem. Below the farce, are the frustrations of both these individuals. Frank, for an unsatisfactory job, and April, for a failed career as an actress.

In an effort to pull up her life, April suggests that the family move to Paris and Frank gets as excited about the proposition. But as always with life, their plans dont work out. This completely shatters April, whose expectations of happiness and escape from a dreary life and as Frank puts it, a "hopeless emptiness", are hanging from a single thread - Paris. When that snaps, so does April.

The climax of the movie has been beautifully shot and poignantly features April's hopelessness and resignation.

Both Kate and Leo are powerhouse actors and do a great job with good support by David Harbour as his best friend and Micheal Shannon as the disturbed intellectual.

This movie may not appeal to all and slowly progresses from one scene to the next, perhaps mimicking life's drabness. But men and women will identify with Frank and April to some extent because we all go through moments when we question our very existence but choose to keep quiet about it.