Book Review: Once Upon a Time in India: The Marvellous Adventures of Captain Corcoran

Ratings: 1 Star Sam Miller shouldn’t have bothered translating this book in English. It was better if it were left untranslated in some dingy French bookstore not bothering anyone. But the deed was done. All I can glean from this book is that Europeans are brave and Indians are treacherous chickens. It actually wouldn’t have […]

Book Review: Pride and Prejudice and Zombies

Ratings: 3 Stars The zombies induced me to pick up this book. But my felicity was short-lived as I read with great dismay that these undead men and women of refined taste, who were in constant habit of mistaking cauliflowers for brains – were thus relegated to mere furniture in the plot of this esteemed […]

Book Review: Oryx and Crake

Ratings: 5 Stars This book took me more than a year to finish. It was the damn monologue. I can’t seem to stand monologues and descriptions and references that I don’t understand unless I read the latter part of the story. At a stretch I could only read a couple of chapters before putting it […]

Book Review: Rebel Sultans: The Deccan from Khilji to Shivaji

Ratings: 1 Star ‘Rebel Sultans’ reads like a cricket commentary, voluble but without any depth. A rat-tat-tat of facts thrown your way, a jumbled assortment of characters moving in and out of picture without leaving any mark – Pillai manages to turn an interesting epoch of history into mindless drivel. The principle problem is of […]

book review: Mohini: The Enchantress

Book review: Mohini: The Enchantress

Book review: Kochland: The Secret History of Koch Industries and Corporate Power in America

Ratings: 5 Stars Easily, one of the best and the most important books that I have read this year. It isn’t just a biography, over its mammoth width – this book is a fine work of investigative journalism. Lobbying, Oil, Labor relations, derivatives-trading, Fracking, Capitalism – more than these ideas, it is a journey of […]

Book review: This Is How They Tell Me the World Ends: The Cyberweapons Arms Race

Ratings: 4 Stars I have often glossed over news headlines like, ‘Apple releases security updates to patch two new zero-days…’ First, because I hardly understood what it meant or what its implications were given my chemical engineering and sales background. Second, it represented a world far, far away and themes far more outlandish – Russia […]

Vampire of chambal

Can Kishan, an IIT aspirant, survive the Vampire of Chambal?

The contract

Rahul Chanchalini had gone on a perilous expedition, one that would make him either extraordinarily rich or a juicy peace offering. He had to make a deal with blood-sucking aliens, would he succeed?

James Bond chalisa: who does it better – me or chatgpt?

So I have been thinking: Will ChatGPT kill my moribund / non-existent writing career? How does it fare if I give it the same writing prompts that I had to work with? I have been tinkering with the prompts and ChatGPT’s responses, and have been getting some interesting results. First impressions though: ChatGPT seems to […]