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  ​  Book: The Art of Seductive Communication Author: Karma Peters No. of Pages: 151 Genre: Non-Fiction, Self-Development Publisher: Self Published using Smashwords   Plenty of good straight-forward to-the-point advice in bite sized chapters (calling them chapters is actually a hyperbole) The book is easy to read and assimilate with each chapter offering a piece of advice followed by explanations and examples. Most of the advice is pretty much common-sense but it is good to have it all in one place … as a reminder for you. If you had no time, you could read the table of contents and get a gist of the book. Also, the table of Contents is a summary of the book and can serve as a quick reminder for you when you have read the book and want to remind yourself the key principles. Mind you, it has a looong table of contents. Of course, the worth of such a book is not in the beauty of how well it is written. It is in how well you a...

As a voracious reader and a budding author who is too lazy to write, i have a soft corner for books and their authors. So i will always be ready to extend a helping hand when it comes to reviewing books and talking about authors. So this post is a spotlight on the book "Metro Diaries' by the blogger author Namrata who is popularly known by her online identity of Privy Trifles. She is a prolific reader herself and reviews books at http://www.privytrifles.co.in/ Well, as i said, this post is to shine a spotlight on a book and the author. So here we go ... About the Book: Love is one of the most amazing feelings on this earth, one that makes you the most powerful person or the most helpless person in a split second. These stories capture those feelings of despair, longing, love, lust, desire, want, dejection and admiration to create deja vu. Hold onto your hearts as you flip through these pages and take a walk down the memory lane as "Metro Diaries" w...

Preface to the blog post J Blogs are conversations Sometimes they are conversation which the blogger has with himself / herself while there are times when the conversation is with the readers. If the reader has a point of view and would like to join the conversation, he/she will comment and the conversation continues. Sometimes, conversations lead to blog posts. Ideas discussed spark off things in the bloggers head and they end up writing about it on their blogs. This blog post is one such conversation which started with email exchange and then the summary of that email exchange culminates in the blog post. I came across the news item about Myntra 'shutting down' their website and going completely mobile. Since Myntra is now owned by Flipkart, it was their decision to do this and I had a perspective on it. I share the news item and my perspective with the one and only one, Nikhil Kulkarni , with whom I have had countless discussions and brai...

  ​  Book: Lead Tin Yellow Author: Doug Gunnery No. of Pages: 348 Genre: Fiction Publisher: Partridge India   Difficult to rate this book ... I liked reading it but wasn't really excited about it. It could have been a fast paced action suspense thriller but the author chose to give it a steady pace without end-of-the-chapter cliff-hangers which are typical in murder mystery and chase oriented novels. Surprisingly, I did not feel bored though. It was different and I somehow liked it, even though it was not my usual taste. There was a certain definite quality of the writing (I can't really place my finger on) which kept me going till the end. It was an interesting read and the 'relatively slower' pace also made it more believable. The unsuspecting protagonist thrown into a dire situation suddenly becomes a hero doing things he couldn't have imagined. That's not what happens here. The response of the pr...

If the children can't go to school, why not take the school to them and make it enjoyable – as enjoyable as a boat ride on the river . With these thoughts, Ajeet Singh started a novel and innovative 'boat school'. Considered a stepping stone in the world of learning, the children spend two hours after their regular school day and study, play or revise without any pressures or tensions. This interesting concept got coverage in leading newspaper as the ' Varanasi Boat School '. I first read about it on DoRight.in and was intrigued by it. I almost dismissed it as a random gimmick but something told me that the boat school was not just floating around … it was just the first step in the Journey of Doing Right . I did a bit of googling and found that Ajeet Singh means serious business here and it is not a temporary experiment. In fact, he is not alone in this initiative either. I saw a couple of boat school and other innovative sc...

  ​   Book: I Am Pilgrim Author: Terry Hayes No. of Pages: 624 Genre: Fiction, Thriller Publisher: Atria/Emily Bestler Books   A deeply entwined story with various facets The author delves deep into the psyche of the protagonist and the villain - other characters have their significant role to play and hardly anyone is marginalized but the author spends so much time (and words) on the two central characters that by the end of the book - you feel for them, you feel with them and you feel like them. The book starts off with a murder - an almost perfect murder - and it is seems like a murder mystery ... which it isn't the story veers towards the life of an ex secret service agent - our protagonist ... and we feel that the story might go down the path of another Jason Bourne ... but it doesn't the story also begins to follow the life and times of the 'villain' giving us an in-depth view of his life through the words of...

  ​   Book: 1,000 Awesome Writing Prompts Author: Ryan Andrew Kinder No. of Pages: 111 Genre: Non-Fiction Publisher: Self Published using Amazon Digital Services   A really nice book for all those who were lazy to write (but wanted to write) and their excuse for not writing was a lack of inspiration for a plot idea. The book is even good for that amateur who wants to start writing but facing 'start-up' issues. This book gives you a thousand (quite literally) prompts .. which can act as a plot line or a starting point for a short or a long story. You could potentially write extremely short flash-fiction, a short story, a novella or even a full length novel using those ideas. At the beginning, the book is not event trying to make you write a story … it simply gives you a nudge – a thought on which to write a few lines and paragraphs. Then it gives you an idea to expand with varied constraints of time as well as word limit (from 55 ...