Naga's Ruminations and Reviews

Rating 3.5/5 Genre Contemporary A woman in her late 20s works at an art gallery. She has had a troubled past with parents who were distant, selfish and uncaring. She has an inner voice that is highly judgemental and critical. She looks at everything and everyone with hatred and dislike. She doesn't like this about herself and wants a transition so profound that there is no trace left of the past her. She thinks sleeping endlessly without break for a year would help her erase her past and past self. To be reborn again as a new her. She finds a psychiatrist on yellow pages and tells her all kinds of stories and lies to get prescriptions for powerful drugs. The doctor Dr.Tuttle is quite a character who is wierd, forgetful, sloppy and incompetent. She uses loopholes in the insurance system to prescribe drugs for hearing loss, anxiety, paranoia etc when the complaint our protagonist has is insomnia. She even gives samples of drugs that are not approved to be in the market. ...

This is a short story and a quick read with only 27 pages. The story tries to redefine what it means to be living in hell. It creates an alternate reality of the place called hell where souls go after death. Here souls are neither roasted for eternity in fire nor tormented by hard physical torture. They are subjected to a different kind of pain.. Three souls having commited sins of deception, lies, narcissism and murder etc  are forced to stay together in a room in hell after they are dead. Soon their flaws, sins and insecurities are exposed to each other. They are locked in a tug of pull and push with each other. They cant love the other due to an awareness of their true nature. They cant hate the other cause they are stuck with them for eternity in the same room. What happens to someone if they cant go mad or die (to escape repetition and boredom) because it is a soul..  The story is quite popular from the author and it is great thrill to read it. Sometimes short...

Rating 4/5 Genre Romance, Magic, Fantasy I am honestly surprised that there are not more people who have read this book(based on the number of ratings in goodreads) and found it impressive like me. With this book I learnt that I could appreciate a story with flawed characters and like them all despite the imperfections. The main characters are powerful in a supernatural way and drive the narrative forward with their fated (sometimes impulsive) actions and suffer through the lasting consequences of those actions. When I picked this book, based on the title, I expected something to do with magic, spells, curses and was only half keen on reading it past a few initial chapters. I have been doing this a lot lately..just trying a book on before committing myself to read it through to the end. I soon found myself engrossed in a tale of fated romance spanning multiple lives, dark magic binding the souls into a dance with each other for eternity. It’s the same story that plays ...

Genre horror, thriller  IMDb rating 6/10  Budget 50 - 80million dollars  Box office 40 million dollars  Starring Krksten Stewart of twilight fame.  I felt that the concept and story are pretty good but the cinematography is poor. Not just poor but really bad. I watched this film twice to make sense of what's actually happening.  Most of it is shot underwater in the glare of flashlights and headlights.  A bunch of people are caught in an underwater drilling station when an earth quake occurs. It damages most of the base stations and equipment. It also releases a swarming pool of alien like creatures into water which kill and feed on human flesh. With a high risk of their drill station exploding, they must reach a near by station in order to access air pods which can fly them back to the surface. With no alternate option available, they decide to make the journey on foot. To actually walk the distance on ocean bed. Braving the odds, some of t...

The characters in the story have a depth and are well defined. Ignatius is a character concoction that will remain with me for long. He is both self righteous and naive at his core that makes me sympathetic although he is not portrayed to evoke such an emotion. He is a big fat man who depends on his mother and some menial jobs to survive him(due to his ideals) despite having quality education from college. What circumstances in life must have produced someone as idealistic and rebellious, selfish, self righteous as Ignatius is a wonder. Bad parenting is one word that comes to mind. His mother dotes on him endlessly with no personal life for herself until she has had enough with Ignatius. She gets into a car accident which sets off a series of events into action that are both hilarious and ordained(or so they seem).   I am going with a liberal 4 out of 5 for the plot and the screenplay. I would have liked immensely to have some background into the childhood and early li...

Rating 3/5  Genre journalism, AIDS epidemic  I wanted to read this book to learn about AIDS. How it has started, what were the events that lead to its discovery and why it doesn't have a cure. Most of what i wanted to learn, which I call useful information, is found in the first 100 and last 100 pages. The rest of the chapters and stories in the 1000+ page book seemed irrelevant that I just skipped them. It was too much information..too many details. I was afraid that I would lose sight of the forest for too many trees. Although it seemed like thorough journalism and the author at the end claimed to have included no fiction in the narrative, the characters are one too many, the story is boringly repetitive.  The author fails to evoke an emotion of injustice and unfairness through conveying the same message over and over again. At the bottom of it, the reason for the unchecked wide spread of AIDS epidemic in the United states between late 1970s to around 1985 i...

                       Once Viswamitra who was a Rajarshi (a king who has become self realized) grew envious of Vashista who was a Brahmarshi (a sage who is enlightened and self realized) and decided to become a brahmarshi himself. He reasoned that if he also turned into a brahmarshi, he would become more respectable and sages like Vashista would treat him as an equal. He set off to a forest and started to perform deep penance. For a long time he performed his penance without interruption from the outside world. He grew content with each passing day that he was nearing his goal and would anyday seize the honor he so craved for.                                            Then one day a beautiful celestial maiden Menaka appeared near the hut where Viswamitra was undergoing his daily austerities. She had come to that ...