Naga's Ruminations and Reviews

Review of Lord of the flies by William Golding Rating 4.5/5 Genre: classic,horror,young adult A band of children are stranded on an island when their flight crashes. Their pilot is dead and they are left to take care of themselves without adult supervision. Ralph, Jack, Piggy(a really fat and myopic kid) are the three main important characters. Roger and Simon also play crucial roles in the plot. Initially Ralph becomes the chief/head of their group and with the help of Piggy(intelligent and forward thinking) establishes rules so that they could build shelters for staying,hunt for food and burn a fire to hail for rescue. Soon Jack challenges his authority and takes away a group of children with him. Things start becoming evil as Jack and his group brutally kill a mother sow(a female pig) and descreate its head. They hoist its head on a spike and leave its guts to be fed upon by the flies(a symbol for Lord of the flies/beezlebub). [This scene marks the transition from innocence in...

 Story of Candaules,  King of Lydia,Turkey By Herodotus  Candaules was a king of Lydia, Turkey. He had a beautiful wife named Nyssia. He worshipped her beauty and often boasted of it with great pride. He had a bodyguard named Gyges. Candaules once tells Gyges that he is going to prove to him that there is no one comparable in beauty to his wife(maybe Gyges didnt believe his claims or the king just wanted to show off..). So the king puts together a plan and tells it to Gyges in confidence. He tells Gyges that every night the queen has a habit of getting undressed in their room before getting into bed. So he asks Gyges to stand near a door in their room and watch secretly her as she is undressing. Gyges stands near the door in darkness and waits for the queen to come into the room. Candaules pretends to be asleep and waits for the queen to come. So Nyssia comes into the room, goes to a desk and removing her clothes one by one puts them on the desk. Gyges gets mesmer...

The English Patient book by Michael Ondaatje review Rating 3.5/5 Genre: romance, drama, war It is the time of 1942-43. Italy and its allies are at war with Germany. The war is coming to an end and German forces are retreating from Italy. A pilot is flying a helicopter in a sandy desert and it catches fire. He hits the ground with a parachute but his skin is badly burnt and his nerves are so damaged he can barely move. The local tribal people rescue him and take care of him as long as he proves useful to them. He knows the maps of the desert by heart and can recognize different models of guns. They find this kind of information useful during the war. And when he is no longer useful, they abandon him at a hospital in Villa San Guirlamo in Florence. He remebers everything but doesnt know his name. No one knows who he is but from the way he talks think he is British. Hence he is referred to as the English Patient. As the war is coming to an end, the doctors plan to shift the hospital to ...

Review of Pratiroju pandage movie (2019) Rating 4/5  The hero's grandfather is diagnosed with advanced stage lung cancer and the doctor gives an estimate of 5 weeks left for him. The old man's children are well established  business persons, software engineers in USA, Australia and India. They take a detached and practical view of his medical condition deciding to put money, jobs, work over their love for their father. But the hero flies from USA to stay with his grand father the minute he learns of his illness. He decides to make all the unfulfilled dreams of his grandfather come true and celebrate each day left till his death as a festival..hence the title 'pratiroju pandage'. How he was able to convince the other family members to prioritize relationships over money and to reevaluate their bond with their once beloved father is the essence of this movie.  Loaded with humor and dialogues that are reflective of the current prevailing mind set among people, this film is...

I picked The girl with the Dragon Tattoo by Steig Larsson 10 days ago cause it showed on my Goodreads under 'to-read' tag and i was craving for a thriller. 10% into the book, I realize that not only did i read this before but i also watched the movie starring Rooney Mara and that guy from the James Bond series. Well, the girl is pretty electrifying. She is a technical genius, best hacker in the country, could decode login passwords to any computer within seconds, load pages of material into her head with a brief glance at the page with her photographic memory. She is also extremely anti-social, anarchistic, prefers isolation and vengeful to the point of killing an opponent. Ask her to dig for information about someone and she gathers stuff anything worth learning including material that perhaps only those closest to the person know.She joins forces with a journalist who is falsely framed by a major swedish corporation and is convicted for libel(defamation) by the company. What ...

What is a fairy that cannot fly? It's wings are its source of power,pride and freedom. So it is for Maleficent, a small girl fairy born in a kingdom of magic called the Moors. Surrounded by strange but good creatures who trusted one another and never failed to uphold it, she started growing up quite innocent and naive. In the neighboring kingdom, cruel and hardhearted men ruled by an ambitious king plotted and dreamed to take over the Moors. One day a boy who works for the k ing happens to enter the Moors and steal a jewel from the lake. He gets caught by the guards. Maleficent releases him and makes him her friend. As years pass by, their affection for each other grows and she falls in love with him. She also emerges to becoming the protector of the Moors and the most powerful of all fairies. Her trust for the boy she fell in love with soon turns into bitterness through circumstances as he betrays her trust and steals her wings. Innocence shattered, heart broken and trus...

I call myself an avid reader of all kinds of books and mostly enjoy reading thriller and mystery novels. It is one thing to read of the games between life and death in books and another to come across it in real life. One such story which my father narrated a few minutes ago left my jaw hanging for a while. And my thoughts stopped for a few minutes trying to grasp the seriousness and implications of what it meant to the helpless and naive people in our state. This is an incident that took place in a hospital in Nellore, Andhra Pradesh and I urge everyone read it and spread awareness so that innocent lives are not lost in vain. One day an old farmer is brought to the hospital in Nellore by his wife as he had entered into a comatose state. The doctor assigned to the case declares the man brain dead. He tells the wife that it is a lost case and he might never recover. The husband being the sole bread earner of the family, the wife expresses despair and starts crying in front of ...