Wordside Woman

                               (Series Review) “Ransom Canyon” (2025) - Season 1 I am writing this piece with a truckload of guilt weighing in on my heart, and not for the reason you think. I was supposed to get back to my research paper today after a two-week long break. I simply couldn’t focus. I know it is a lame excuse. I started watching " Ransom Canyon " yesterday evening and by mid-noon today, I finished watching all ten episodes of it. I was watching an interview of Josh Duhamel and Minka Kelly (the lead pair), where the interviewer was telling them how the viewers were comparing the show to a cross between “ Yellowstone ” and “ Virgin River ”. It is indeed an astute observation. That’s definitely one way to describe the show. I have not really watched many Westerns, lets alone Romantic Westerns.  But I have had enough exposure to know what to expect in general when the term “western” pops up in...

(Series Review) “ The Pit ” (2025) - Season 1 I used to be an aspiring medical student at one point of time in my life. I am not even sure if that is a thing, but I still experience this pull I can’t shake for anything remotely close to medicine and doctors. I do realize it a place frequented by the sick and the infirm, where pain and loss creates a miasma of despair all over the place. Having said that, it also the place where one is relieved of pain and misery, where the initiated perform their magic on human physiology and wins us more days on this planet. I guess it is all a matter of perspectives. I feel reassured and safe when I am in a hospital and I tend to look at the bright side of the place. There is this inherent respect I feel for these warriors, not for their station life, rather for their raw spine of resolve and their willingness to pursue a career that is slowly turning into a life hazard owing to the excessive and unwarranted violence directed against them on a daily ...

                                                     (Movie Review) " Am I OK?" (2022) Today was yet another one of those extremely unproductive days, but slightly better than the worst ones. At least I didn’t starve myself for being too lazy to cook. I had been wanting to see this movie after I chanced upon a trailer of this on the YouTube. I must confess I watched it for Dakota Johnson. I love that woman (that is, in the capacity of an actor of course…. duh!). She will forever be Anasthasia Steele for me. I don’t know what it is exactly that attracts me to her, but there is definitely something. But this is not about my inexplicable attraction for the leading lady. It is about what I felt about the movie. Wikipedia says it is a comedy drama film and I am choosing to go with it for want of a better word to describe the genre. I must tell there are no h...

                                                     Movie Review: Your Name (2016) It was a colleague of mine who insisted that I watch Your Name. I couldn’t bring myself to watch it for some reason. After a couple of weeks, as I lay on my bed at night, wrestling with recalcitrant sleep, I automatically proceeded to click on the link. For some reason, as soon as I started watching it, sleep decided to take me in its warm embrace. This happened several times over the next few days. Eventually, three days into my summer vacation, one night, after all had gone to sleep, I made up my mind to watch it in the darkened room. With the low humming of the air conditioner and my sleeping mother’s deep breath in the background, I found myself slowly getting drawn into the dreamlike, magically enmeshed worlds of Mitsuha Miyamizu and Taki Tachibana. The movie opens ...

                      Shreelancer : The Journey of a Stoic Freelancer Director: Sandeep Mohan Release Date: 18 August 2017 (India)   The indie filmmaker Sandeep Mohan has crafted a visual narrative sans the polish and glitter of a commercial feature film in Shreelancer . The movie is as much about Shree’s search for his own comfortable space as it is about him getting pushed out into the boundless world where he is forced to look life in the eye in all its bitter glory. The dispiriting contrast between Shree’s aspirations and reality becomes apparent in the very first scene, in the café, where after taking a few deep breathes, he plugs himself into the right mental zone aided by mood music and a steaming cup of coffee, only to be shown writing an add for a cheap Thai foot massage parlor. Lack of validation from his father, who would rather he take up a nine to five job, coupled with financial instability, stops him fr...

  Book Review #2 “ The Covenant of Water ” (2023) By Abraham Verghese   “Covenant” means ‘a formal agreement or promise between two or more people’. The author has his own interpretation for this term as he surmises it through the character of Mariamma: And now that the daughter is here, standing in the water that connects them all in time and space and always has. The water she first stepped into minutes ago is long gone and yet it is here, past and present and future inexorably coupled, like time made incarnate. This is the covenant of water: that they are all linked inescapably by their acts of commission and omission, and no one stands alone. She stays there listening to the burbling mantra, the chant that never ceases, repeating its message that ‘all is one’. What she thought was her is all ‘maya’ an illusion, but it is one shared illusion. And what else can she do but go on.   (Verghese ‘The Covenant’ 706). The Parambil family has a bizarre relationship wi...

                                  " 1Q84 " By Haruki Murakami (Book Review) #1                     This is not exactly a book review, rather, some random thoughts about the work that came to me on the day I finished reading it. I bought this book in the October of 2021 as a treat to myself after receiving my first paycheque. This was all the luxury I could afford with my meagre salary from working as a faculty on contract. I had read two other books of Murakami’s previously: Norwegian Wood (1987) and Colourless Tsukuru Tazaki and his Years of Pilgrimage (2013). There was something soothing about these novels that made me gravitate to another work of his. However, the sheer volume of the book quelled my excitement by the time I reached home. I tried reading the first couple of pages only to realise that my headspace was not tuned to vibe well with the...

                            The Reality Called Depression To most of the upstanding citizens of our society, depression is still an uninspired excuse given by delinquents and deadbeats to wash their hands of responsibilities. These empirically shaped mortals obsessed with productivity have a problem with wrapping their head around abstract illnesses. Even considering the possibility of its existence among their peers or within oneself is viewed as a betrayal of their carefully cultured misplaced convictions. Unless there are festering wounds, lethal cuts, exsanguination, detached limbs, misbehaving cells or at least a cytokine storm, one doesn’t qualify to be addressed as “sick”. The community doesn’t make things easier for the depressed either. The well-meaning aunties in the neighborhood and opinionated uncles making unsolicited visits to your house fuel you on guilt trips that more often than not end with self-lo...

  SHADOW   Directionless, I walk through lighted corridors, I force myself to move along, Unyielding to the luring offers of the shady corners, Heaviness slows me down to a crawl, Let me stop, bleed away a little of my beingness, Reduce myself, shrink myself to naught, Make myself light, I look down and realise there are two of me, We meet where my feet begin, I run back and forth to no avail, Can’t seem to outrun it, My constant creepy companion, Reluctantly I lie down, And we became one in an embrace.  

  A Word to the Practitioners of Non Scientific Disciplines from a Peer      Having your existence and worth questioned recurrently in life can be a mind numbing and soul crushing event. When the same happens in the field of academia it is belittling, embarrassing and intellectually lethal at best. The practitioners of non-scientific academic disciplines are, now more than ever, being forced to validate their existence in the academic world, repeatedly, to no avail. Considering this eventuality to be premeditated on the part of the scientific community to project their relevance by contrasting it against the “opposing group” will do no good to anyone. It is time we stopped pointing fingers and took responsibility for ensuring that our disciplines be made current, in keeping with the course of the global civilisation’s path ahead to the future.      So, how do we alter our roles as mute spectators, indulging in stodgy running commentaries on life al...