Life Etc Etc

Background:  The Second World War and my family go a long way back, members of my family took part in the war on behalf of the British. My grandfather himself had a fortuitous escape when the Japanese bombed  Vizag harbour  and Vizag thermal power plant on April 6th, 1942 . The war and its stories have ever since then, been a source of discussion in my family. Being inquisitive about history, I spent a lot of time trying to know about various facets of the war including watching whatever movies or documentaries I could lay my hands on. However, I have never read or watched anything about Dunkirk until I saw the movie. This was fresh territory for me and I wanted to approach the movie with a clean slate to know more about history ( which I confess wasn't a very bright idea considering how well history is manipulated in movies ). Plot Setting:  It's May 1940,  Netherlands , Belgium and Luxembourg have all fallen to the German Offensive. France is on its wa...

How good is the latest Jumanji movie which comes more than two decades after the initial installment with a brand new star cast headed by a very much in-form Dwayne Johnson? Is this is a true-blue Jumanji sequel or is this an official reboot? Is this movie anywhere close to the first one in terms of thrills and chills? I guess we have enough questions to answer now so let's not wait any further and get started off with our movie review for Jumanji 2 (Welcome to the Jungle). Plot: It's 1996 and Jumanji (the evil board game which siphons people in) finds itself buried in the sands of a beach having been thrown into a river at end of the first movie . The strange drum beats emanating from the game attract a passer-by and as luck would have it, he takes the game to his home and his teenage son. A board game doesn't mean much to a kid of the 90's who swiftly casts it aside. Jumanji then transforms itself into a video game. The transformation catches the eye of the teenage...

Picture This!  It's a lazy day and you have plenty of time to kill (if you don't have too many or any of those ' free time'  days you gotta make some serious changes to your life). You are fed up of the TV and the updates on the social media don't excite you. You want to do something different but don't feel like going out. You are looking for something interesting to read or hold your attention. That's precisely the time for a book like ' A beam of light '. It has a plot which moves at a steady pace and holds your attention through all the twists and turns.     Plot: Inspector Salvo Montalbano wakes up from a nightmare with a start. The nightmare has him visit a vacant plot to investigate a coffin containing the body of someone very familiar. As Montalbano struggles to make sense of the dream he's beckoned to a vacant plot to investigate a cabin which turns to be a hideout out for anti-nationalist forces. The vacant plot has an eerie semb...

So here we are in 2018 with another year gone way too soon. But why am I lamenting? Almost nothing went to plan in 2017 , I was stalled, stumped and almost stopped. I spent long periods of time doing nothing, didn't make many new friends (frankly lost a few close ones), didn't add the precious zeroes to the bank balance, didn't take pics which generated many likes and didn't even write a blog post which generated enough buzz. So why am I thinking about a year which I probably couldn't wait to end? Why am I even writing a blog about it? A year where it took time to recognize the path  The answer is very simple, the year 2017 gave me time . It gave me loads of time as I transitioned between jobs. True, the break wasn't expected but the down time was exactly what I needed after more than five years of non-stop work. If it was up to me I would have put off taking a vacation for at least another year but time intervened to give me a break when I needed it...