Kiss Kiss Bang Bang

Saturday morning, nice weather outside...a lot of pending stuff to be done but for 103 minutes I could resist the temptation to go outside and keep the tensions of incomplete tasks at bay.

Kiss Kiss Bang Bang is the story of a petty thief Harry Lockhart (Robert Downey Jr.) who lands in a LA party after gatecrashing into an audition while fleeing from cops. In the party he bumps into a struggling actor (Harmony Faith Lane) and realizes her to be his childhood friend. He is introduced to Gay Perry (Val Kilmer), a private detective, whose job is to "keep corpses" away from his boss. Harry is asked to take detective lessons from Gay and they end up witnessing a murder. What follows is a hilarious, but not in your face moments. Robert Downey Jr. did a great job as the narrator and the "side kick" of Val Kilmer. Haven't seen too many Kilmer movies.. had seen only Batman Forever but it was good to know that the guy has a funny bone and keep a straight face while "joking". Michelle Monaghan as Harmony was perfect. Neither too feminine nor a shaolin returned action lady. This movie would seem like a quentin tarantino or guy ritchie kind of movie. Fast paced & funny. A very entertaining and "edge of the seat" kind of movie.

Buddha - Karen Armstrong Review

I read this book a few weeks ago. I realized that I did not know much about Buddha even though I was practicing Buddhism for nearly a year. I googled for the best books on Buddhism and decided to purchase this one. Karen Armstrong wrote it from a historian's perspective and if I have one word to describe her work it will be - Marvelous. She starts with providing a background of what the culture in the Indo Gangetic plain was during Siddharth Goutama's time. She remained objective throughout, and separated the myth from reality beautifully. The chapter on Enlightenment was fascinating & so were the descriptions after the enlightenment. Since it is essentially a biography of Buddha, it stuck to it's character of providing a description of Buddha's life. It ventured slightly into the teachings but not too much to lose sight of it's objective. My verdict. Read the book. You'll come to know a lot of things about Buddhism and human emotions which we tend to conveniently ignore

Robin Cook - Foreign Body Review

Read on 22-05-2011

The subject of this so called Medical Thriller is medical tourism. A medical student Jennifer Hernandez comes to know that her grandmother is dead and that too on the other side of the globe in India. Grandma Fernandez had come all the way to India to undergo a hip replacement surgery. The cost of a hip replacement surgery in India is $5000 compared to $20000-$40000 in USA. (I checked the rates just now). Well like Granny a lot of people from US came to get their surgeries done and also had the photo op at the Taj Mahal for free. This got the healthcare barons in the States real worried and they devised a scheme to stop the outflow of patients from the US. The scheme was simple. Show the world the pitfalls of coming to India and have the data to prove it. The flaw in the plan was that the data was flawless. Indian healthcare in the private sector was too good. So they decided to create bad data by bumping of patients from the US after their surgeries and passing on the info to CNN. Jennifer comes to investigate and her boyfriend follows her, she takes the help of her closest friend and mentor Laurie who comes to India as well, with her husband. Mr Cook then proceeds straight to the main course where we have more murders, incest and a view of what the Indian bureaucracy does in a crisis situation -- buries it's head in the sand. After 400 pages Mr. Cook realizes that there are too many loose ends and so he cooks up a potpourri and ended up keeping it semi cooked. The novel started off well, nice & slow and in some cases with too much detail, but in the end he kind of lost plot and tried to a 0 - 60 kmph in less than a second. If you are waiting for a connecting flight or a train or have nothing else to do. Pick up the book, otherwise just let it be.

However to be fair to the author, he raised two important questions

1.) will the western health care sector try to sabotage the Indian Medical tourism industry??? Is the lancet coverage of NDM Super bug a part of that scheme??

2.) The profits from the private healthcare are not flowing into improving public healthcare which is in dire straits but are only fattening the wallets of biz tycoons who are running the facilities.

These questions wouldn't have arisen in my mind if I hadn't read the book.

Preface

Somebody defined Preface as that part of the book which is never read. Well in my case it has been slightly different. I find preface very interesting, that is because it is where the author is talking to me as a person, in the remaining part of the book it is his characters that do the talking and in school days preface was the only part of the book which was completely read.

I've read over 200 novels till date, had started active reading in 2003. 200 in 8 years is not a great number when I have the example of Clinton who read over 300 in his short stint at Oxford. I'll certainly try to improve the score and expand my reading to cover non fiction as well.

And following a good friend's advice I've decided to write a review of the books.

So Bon Voyage!!!!