A commissioned review -
An anthology is a
strange thing. An anthology is stranger, if it follows no rule. An anthology,
probably, is strangest when it does not even tie down its stories to a certain
genre.
This anthology
began with a scene off the history, and moved to a blood-soaked knife in a Starbucks café. We never got to know what
happened with Ila in the first, or to the knife in the second. Because, the
book by then has moved on, and we are already at a higher level of fantasy, casting
the very Big B in a very own film as the protagonist who is a film director
with many flops and an interested Mr. Bachchan who still – for unfathomable
reasons – walks up and asks for a script not once but twice all over. However,
I liked the way the fourth story took up. The cue being one of high strung
theatrical dialogue, a cut succeeding the scene brought the writer as well as
the reader back to an assuring comfort where they could resume their normal
tone and pace. I give it to the writer to have thought of it that way!
By the sixth
story, we are once again back in a coffee shop, talking of minister’s messages
that pronounce a sudden dawn. The seventh takes us into a cliché of a
triangular affair, one that would’ve fallen common with another 8 of ten
submissions with this cue if I were to take a guess. I wish the writer played
it better than that. And the seventh looked like its previous in both tone and
theme. At around this point, I believe it will be fair to say that the writer
had found his ground and was playing the game in the comfort of the known
albeit at cost of repetition. And this, hold on, also continues over to the
next story and then the next. The Love
Jihad was a final note of relief as the story took a bounded secular turn by its
very cue.
The Karma Agni in
my order was the best pick in the series. The sentiments of army men deaths, however
commonplace, never fails to bring in you a sense of weight that is both filled
with compassion as well as gratitude. The final story also has its own bit of
aesthetics as it narrates from frst person a sory of a girl who is yet to be
thirteen and who loves the sea.
All in all, it is
a fair attempt by someone who has played the game by its many rules and
persevered through the process, and demonstrated how the journey of eleven
stories over eleven months has improved the skills of the art.
I give it a 5 on
a scale of 10. Good luck to writing!
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