Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Oh God! How do you describe Italo Calvino? However can you describe how he writes? His words are like the dreams that we sometimes have in mid-morning, the perfect ones, where everything is going exactly as planned, where a surprise, and a pleasant one is about to come to fore, where you've almost touched, felt, said what you've wanted to and then-snap! You wake up!

Invisible Cities is like a dream within a dream ( Mr Edgar Allen Poe, the analogy is unintended and I am proud of it actually!). The story starts with Marco Polo in the court of Kublai Khan, narrating stories of cities he has visited. The best bit is, though, it isn't about the cities! It's about every man being a city of sort himself, or every city, rather, being a man, a living, breathing, social organism that thinks, plans, manipulates, lies, deceives, loves and laughs.

Through his descriptions, Calvino makes you think, "Am I someone who is the product of places (s)he has lived in? Or are the places I have lived in a product of who I am?"

I sound like Confucius to you? Well, read this book and you'll find out why? This one's a book to read and remember!

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Romeo and Juliet by William Shakespeare
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

To read or not to read, that is the question!

In sooth, I cannot say what made me read this eternal love story of Romeo and Juliet, however, 'cause love is blind and had no end, so is my passion for books, my friend!

Ok, enough trying to copy that old Bard. I am nearly not as good, but then, so isn't Romeo and Juliet , not if you grew up on Bollywood movies like me. Yes, Romeo and Juliet is everything from Qayyamat se Qayyamat tak to Ram Leela and from Ishaqzadde to Isaaq (though there are millions of other adaptations that I have surely missed because enemy families with children in love seems to be the FAVOURITE theme of every Bollywood filmmaker.)

Yes, there are NO spoilers for this one because it is the most commonly used theme in the whole wide world. You already know what's going to happen, plus Romeo is a pedophile because Juliet is just-wait for it- fourteen(No, not kidding!) and then there's an additional task of understanding Shakespeare and deciphering whether "I bite my thumb at thee" is a silly thing to do really or some sort of serious gesticulated offence!

Why read it then? Because even in his tragedies, Shakespeare is hilarious, and beautifully poetic and no adaptation in the world can create what his word-play can! So, 4 stars for words and words alone, and for being a story, that despite being all out there, can still be read and enjoyed and kept me glued to the pages until the very end!

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Julius Caesar by William Shakespeare
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Ah! Good old Caesar! Where do I even begin? My relationship with this particular play has been prenatal. Yes, prenatal! In fact, pre-the imagination of my existence!

Long before my mother even contemplated marriage and was a young, precocious nineteen year old, with infinite love for literature, she fell in love with Julius Caesar and the lines, Beware the Ides of March! not knowing that ten years later, on the Ides of March, her only daughter would be born.

Little did I know, as a kid, my birthday had been immortalised by the most famous playwright of the world and that I was born on a day anyone, who has read Julius Caesar , (which means almost everyone) would remember!

I must have read this play a million times, my first reading being when I was 14, where my mother read it out to me, changing her voice, expressions and mannerisms with each different character, making me love her even more than I already did! Yes, I remember I watched her with rapture in my eyes, watching her transform from the proud Caesar to the docile Calpurnia and the cunning Cassius to the gullible idealist Brutus, wondering Oh my God! This AMAZING lover of literature, this talented actress is my mother? My mother?

Almost five years later, as I presided over the History Association of my college, two sprightly girls came to me with the idea of enacting the play for a function. Almost instantly, my best friend and I set to work but then, on our conference, out in the lawns of MCM DAV College for Women, it became bigger and BETTER.

Why enact Caesar? we thought.
Why not make a parody of it and use it as a platform to address social, political and very, very MCM-al issues?

And we did! Act by act! Scene by scene. My friend's words, my direction and Julius Caesar Tadka Maar Ke (Tempering of Julius Caesar) became all the rage in our college, becoming so big that we were in the newspaper, on the radio, almost everywhere. We performed it twice in a row, for two years, the last time on March 10, 2012. The memories it created were fantastic.

A little way down the roads, on March 15, 2013, I was standing in front of Shakespeare's Globe Theatre in London, gazing at the man whose immortal play had immortalised my birthday and added so many beautiful memories to my life!

Alright! Alright! Where's the goddamn book review ? you ask me. Seriously? Do you need one? Here's a play you could create a thousand beautiful memories with! Do you really need me to comment on its language, style, story? Just grab a copy and read it already!

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Italo's Italy

If On A Winter's Night A Traveller by Italo Calvino
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

You know, once in a lifetime, you come across a book that doesn't impose anything on you, that doesn't force you to imagine anything, that starts like it is your story; and then, when you're halfway through it, you realise that you are actually living according to that book, that it is, in some strange, mysterious way, making you a part of its story and no matter how hard you try, you cannot separate your identity from that of the book . 'If On A Winter's Night A Traveller' is that book!

I won't gush over how beautifully it has been written or how poetic or philosophical it is. None of that hogwash! No! I think the best way I can describe my experience with this book is by forcing you to imagine something.

Imagine you're a food junky and you go to this amazing, new restaurant everyone's crazy about. You love the decor, you're impressed by the warmth of the waiting staff and on the menu, you find these amazingly exotic sounding, never-been-heard-of dishes that sound so tempting that you don't know where to start from! Almost on a whim, you order a random number on the menu, say No. 24, and the waiter brings this divine looking, absolutely heavenly to smell dish that makes your mouth water at first sight. Trembling with excitement, you dig your fork in and taste it for the first time. You've never tasted anything as good before! It's so delicious you want to build a house of it and live in it. However, just before you're about to take another bite, the waiter replaces it with another dish, equally exotic, equally divine to smell with an apology that what you tasted wasn't your order but that of the person on another table. Reluctantly, you allow the waiter to replace the dish before you but you find this one's even better. But just before you can take another bite, another waiter comes with the same apology and a different dish. This carries on for the whole night. You ought to be disappointed, angry and indignant instead, with every bite of a new dish, you find yourself more and more in love with the chef who cooked all these wonderful dishes. So what if you never got what you ordered for? At least the experience was worth it. And admit it, you actually enjoyed the tasting!

Yes, this has been my experience with 'If On A Winter's Night A Traveller' . The reading left me HUGELY HUNGRY for more but every story, every tale left me strangely satisfied and in awe of that wonderful author, Italo Calvino . And the funny thing is, the book was about me from the very beginning!

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