A week of misses...

It was a week of disappointments.

I was eager to watch “Maharaja,” the Vijay Sethupathi and Anurag Kashyap film that came highly recommended by a few friends. Unfortunately, I found the violence in the movie to be gratuitous—neither contributing to the plot nor offering any visual artistry. Another quibble I had was the film’s reliance on a convoluted narrative structure to maintain tension and suspense, which ultimately felt superfluous. When the big “reveal” finally occurred at the end (one that I had already guessed halfway through the movie!), my reaction wasn’t “Oh wow!” but rather, “That was unnecessary.” I wanted to like the movie more, but I just couldn’t.

I also had high hopes for “Lessons in Chemistry,” a show on Apple TV that my daughter and I started watching together. Sadly, it didn’t live up to our expectations. We wanted to like it—after all, it seemed to have all the ingredients we enjoy: a strong female lead, a setting in the fifties and sixties (with the potential for a “yellow” tone and great background music), chemistry, science, and cooking! But we struggled through the first episode, hated the second, and ultimately had to give up on the show. The acting felt flat, the pacing was awkward, and the dialogue was clichéd and overly stereotypical. I had heard good things about the book, but now the show has soured me on the idea of reading the book.

I also gave up on a couple of short books I had been reading this week. It wasn’t that they were bad—on the contrary, both were quite good. The first was “The Age of Revolutions” by Fareed Zakaria, and the second was “The Shortest History of India” by John Zubrzycki. However, I found it difficult to maintain momentum with either of them—I kept getting stuck on the pacing of the narratives. And that’s okay; I’ve long since learned that it’s perfectly fine to leave a book unfinished. Even when you only make it halfway through, there’s often still plenty to take away. Maybe I’ll come back to both these books some other day!

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To reset the disappointments from the week gone by, I’m going to go back to comfort food this week: I’m planning to re-read “The Little Prince” (one of my all-time favourites!), and re-watching tried-and-tested Bollywood and Hollywood movies, maybe “English Vinglish” and “Forrest Gump”: that’s the sort of pick-me-up I need after last weeks disappointments!

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