Category: Essay

The Unknown Van Gogh

The Unknown Van Gogh

Posted February 13, 2015 by @amanhimself in Books, Essay, Reviews / 0 Comments

Admire as much as you can. Most people do not admire enough. ― Vincent van Gogh I can’t stop admiring his art work. Sometimes I just want to drown myself in them. Anyone familiar with the drawings and paintings Van Gogh produced will certainly observe that he just not created any beauty with his art work, but the beauty that would give people something to think about. During his short, intense life, one will discover that The Letters of Vincent van Gogh highlight many facets of his personality that are suggested by his work as a visual artist. These complete letters linked with brief passages of connecting narrative and showing all the pen-and-ink sketches provide both a unique self-portrait and a vivid picture of the contemporary cultural […]

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JOHN REBUS- An Uncontrollable Persistence

JOHN REBUS- An Uncontrollable Persistence

Posted January 8, 2015 by @amanhimself in Books, Essay, Reviews / 0 Comments

According to Ian Rnakin, John Rebus was born in 1947, brought up in Fife, has roots from Poland, by a stage hypnotist. In 1987, Rankin’s novel Knots & Crosses introduced us to the tough Edinburgh Detective Sergeant. Rebus, to me, is a hypnotist himself. I sometimes feel that he has inherited his father’s abilities even not following the profession. He takes a reader’s conscience bit by bit and hypnotize him until that reader is plunging in the darkness of John Rebus. He’s the surreal Scotsman, the more you hate, the more you will end up loving him. Ian Rankin prefers to leave the physical appearance of his characters to the reader’s imagination, although when Rebus is first introduced in Knots and Crosses, […]

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What to learn from Dante’s Inferno?

What to learn from Dante’s Inferno?

Posted January 4, 2015 by @amanhimself in Books, Essay / 0 Comments

Dante’s Inferno offers a great amount of lessons that are considered to be moral and necessary. Born in Florence to a noble family, and ended up spending almost half of his life in exile Dante presents The Divine Comedy which is believed an epic, with various moral lessons and taking a reader’s conscience in to his grateful imagination that is altogether a different world from what we are living and it’s basis are the same moral values we believe in. In the review, I talked about how iconic it is that a piece of literature like Dante’s can survive almost 700 years and reaching a state of being well-known. That’s the beauty of his work. “How hard it is to tell what it was like, […]

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2014- The Year in Reading and of Reading Resolutions

2014- The Year in Reading and of Reading Resolutions

Posted January 2, 2015 by @amanhimself in Books, Essay / 0 Comments

The previous post I selected Ten Books I read last year and I would recommend to anyone. On recalling about the books I read did bring back a lot of memories, some related to the books, some not, the good ones, the hard-to-forget-yet-creepy ones as when I had a thought about writing this post. I haven’t revealed here or anywhere before that I did made some reading resolutions before the year started. At first, I was afraid of writing them somewhere and then disappointing myself at the end of the year by not completing them. Though, later on, I did made a list of some of the reading resolutions. Here is a glimpse: Diversify my reading by focusing on other genres apart from Crime/Mystery […]

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Why Should I Read?

Why Should I Read?

Posted November 22, 2014 by @amanhimself in Books, Essay / 0 Comments

Every time I pick a book to read, I know someone or the other thinks it’s just a waste of time thinking being a reader is just my way of being disconnected when a lot is happening in the world. These people disappoint me. I feel pity for them, for their no matter how witty they think they are, their wit fails to understand a simple fact that reading literature is as important as breathing for any living organism. Reading literature is not a waste of time but experiencing a variety of things in lesser time. Each book gives an individual an access to variety of emotions, events and situations that even for a witty mind, it will take decades to experience all that […]

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I Welcome Mac to the Family

I Welcome Mac to the Family

Posted November 10, 2014 by @amanhimself in Essay / 0 Comments

This post is wholesomely dedicated to welcome my new MacBook Air to the family of gadgets, or better: the hierarchy of gadgets I own/had owned in past years. I confess I have a fascination for gadgets and love to be surrounded by them while eating, sleeping, walking, talking. Currently, we are all living in ‘the’ information age and I feel proud that I am a part and parcel of it. I even read most of my books on the smartphone I have. Look around yourself. A lot of things you use consist of computers: your television, your mobile phone, your eReader, and even that machine on which you reading these words. We are all surrounded by hundreds and thousands of computers and […]

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PULP FICTION, Anyone?

PULP FICTION, Anyone?

Posted July 30, 2014 by @amanhimself in Books, Essay / 0 Comments

No, I am not talking about Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction here. But what is Pulp Fiction anyway? The real pulp fiction goes back to the magazines that used cheaper pulp paper in order to sell in great volume to a voracious reading public. These magazines had their heyday in the 1920s, ’30s and ’40s. It was fiction for the people, for the guy on the crowded subway going to work, or the busy mother with five kids who got a little reading time at night. It was for the people who wanted to be caught up in a fictive dream. It was not written in a style aimed at some elite literati.

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BOOK REVIEW: Frankenstein by Mary Shelley

BOOK REVIEW: Frankenstein by Mary Shelley

Posted July 20, 2014 by @amanhimself in Books, classics, Essay, Goth, Reviews / 0 Comments

For several years, I avoided reading FRANKENSTEIN by Mary Shelly because the name had been caught up in endless clichés and had been inextricably linked with the horror genre, which I consider a bad form of fiction. However, being obsessed on reading more Gothic Fiction and the author herself I decided to give it a read and I confess that I am sorry I have waited for this long. The story behind the writing this great piece of Gothic Fiction is as animate as the book itself. In 1816, at Lord Byron’s villa on shores of Lake Geneva, Lord Byron himself and his guests Percy Shelley, Mary Shelley, and John Polidori. Byron, inspired by some fireside readings of supernatural tales, suggested that each member of the party should write […]

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Travel Diary: Hauz Khas Village, a little Brooklyn in New Delhi

Travel Diary: Hauz Khas Village, a little Brooklyn in New Delhi

Posted June 22, 2014 by @amanhimself in Essay / 0 Comments

No, Hauz Khas Village is not the most populous area of New Delhi, but it’s certainly a mini-Brooklyn. Though it’s been twenty and one years, I have been living in Delhi, I have never seen such an inspiring place in this city of djins. But yesterday, a friend of me took there and I must say, I fell in love with the place. It’s a paradise for an artist to revive, and you get everything there, the yummy food (multi-cuisines), the art, the inspiration and the peace. What more an artist needs? Hauz Khas is one of the more affluent neighborhoods in South Delhi, and is named after an ancient water reservoir by the same name. Hauz means ‘water tank’ (or lake) and Khas means ‘royal’, giving it the meaning, the ‘Royal […]

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WRITER's BLOCK #1: Self Love

WRITER's BLOCK #1: Self Love

Posted March 9, 2014 by @amanhimself in Books, Essay / 0 Comments

A writer is a person who spends more time in reading other people’s words than writing himself. You and I are both writers in that context. But there are times when we feel tortured sitting by a desk with pen (in most cases, a laptop) in one hand scratching our head with the other and a blank page in front of us. Drops of sweat cool us down only for some milliseconds. But have you ever wondered why you cannot write? Of course, we all have. We all have been through that torment phase of inability to write. And we all call that phenomenon, a Writer’s Block. Writer’s block is that phase in which we tend to think of ourselves […]

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