The Man Reviews Just Married Please Excuse!

I must confess, that Yashodhara Lal’s book lay around for a while because I tend to avoid books on touchy feely subjects like relationships, marriage and anything that might not contain gratuitous violence. But once I picked it up, I was pleasantly surprised. It’s a bit like the first time you watch the Gangnam Style video. You begin a bit sceptically, but then keep returning to it day after day, giggling manically while other people stare at you.

The book hooks you from the beginning with its blend of first person narrative, humour, and all round witty writing. I believe the author has a blog as well, and this book is largely a compilation of her blog posts, but it is stitched together remarkably well.

As someone who has never read her blog, I figured the book would be a sort of romantic comedy, all lovey dovey types. Boy, was I wrong! The book scores well because the author comes across as a bit of an irascible young lady from a worldly family married to a goofy, good natured kinda country bumpkin. Spoilt brat meets traditional Indian male. That sort of thing. So you know things aren’t gonna be pretty. The various fights and tribulations are covered in loving detail, and you often find yourself going ouch while also laughing at the same time.

The book covers the period from when she first met her husband (who has to be one of the nicest guys given that he is the butt of many jokes in the book), their marriage, to her career, to having a baby, and of course, lest we conclude the book is wholly about the funny side of domestic life, it throws in a crisis or two that the family must deal with. Each character is lovingly caricatured with all their foibles. Sometimes, the foibles are exaggerated to breaking point. To Yashodhara’s credit she skilfully keeps things in the realm of the almost believable. Because of the style of writing, you take things in your stride and smile along with the author instead of frowning.

At times, the book’s honesty surprises you, especially because the writer has not bothered to give the characters any fictional names. Everyone is presented in an unvarnished fashion, and with no attempt to hide any flaws. This of course leads to some good situational comedy.

However, I can only reiterate that the author’s friends and family must all be saints, and good humoured ones at that to have so many details of their private lives exposed for the world at large. If my wife wrote this book, well let’s just say I would be now calling her my first wife!

Click Here to read more of Firdaus Variava's guest posts for The Caterpillar Cafe including a really cheeky one on Fifty Shades of Gray

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The Man Reviews Fifty Shades of Grey

'If I hear one more mention of that goddamned book...' I said to myself the other day. And then Firdaus Variava meets me at a party and says, 'What's the deal with that Anastasia chick anyway?', making me backtrack at the faint whiff of opportunity. 'Why don't you review it for us? From a man's...' And just like that he was gone. Judging by the fact that I received this in my mailbox just a few days later, I'm guessing he zipped home, got down and (hopefully) dirty. Thank you Fido, for a man's perspective of Fifty Shades of Gray. (Readers: This is the last time we dedicate any space to the book. Promise!)

There was once a girl – we don’t know if she’s particularly hot, or if she has big boobs, because the author has clearly not written this book with the gruffer sex in mind – who falls in love with what could be considered the ideal man. He is gorgeous looking, obscenely rich, generous with said money, and loves her to bits. Only problem is, he likes to have sex in unusual and inventive ways. 

As a man, I was saying uh huh..nuthin wrong with dat. If you have the imagination, go for it amiright? As long as you treat the girl nice and stuff, she should be over the moon with this added feature of the relationship.
Nuh-uh! Not this girl. She keeps going on about dragging her lover from his dark place into the light, trying to bring him to her version of “normal”. Her version of normal relationships includes roses, romance, candlelit dinners and all that Mills and Boons stuff. She gets most of that from this poor fellow, but she just can’t wrap her head around the kinky sex.  Which, by the way isn’t really that kinky. It’s like, stuff your mother would find kinky. Or maybe your grandmother. There is a red room of pain, but most of the implements seem to be there only for decoration. Only some really tame stuff gets used.

So anyways, after unsuccessfully trying to change him, she dumps him. The end.

This whole novel has the sort of morality that only a repressed middle aged woman could come up with. It’s also filled with the sort of trite nonsense that used to pass for spiritual talk in the 70’s like - “her inner goddess” and “her subconscious”.

Oh puh-lease woman..we are so beyond that sh*t now.

By the end of it you just wish that Anastasia Steele would get her head out of her ass and see that this guy is the best thing that could happen to her. The constant drama, pathetic attempts to inject emotion into the whole thing, coupled with said tame sex scenes (which are numerous, but not very long) finally drive you to start skipping paragraphs in the hope that she will finally come around and there will be a happy ending.
But of course, the only conceivable happy ending would be if the publisher or author called me up personally, apologised, and returned the Rs. 250 that I spent on this book!

When Fido isn't reading women's erotica, he loves playing video games at work and spending time with his beautiful children whose shenanigans he records (sometimes) on his blog, Delirious Daddy 

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Review | The Emperor of all Maladies

Don't you just love Mondays? Neither do we. Guest post # 1 for the Caterpillar Cafe. We enjoyed reading it and if you have the book, feel free to lend it to us. Love - Us.

I finished reading The Emperor of all Maladies by Siddhartha Mukherjee about a week ago, but like all good books, this one has been kept within easy reach for re-picking, reference and rumination. It won the Pulitzer Prize for Non-Fiction 2011, but I didn’t get around to reading it for quite a while, simply because I thought it might be a tad disturbing and full of gory case studies of mankind’s greatest killer – Cancer.

Nothing could be further from the truth. While the book’s subject matter is grim, with the incidence of cancer growing decade by decade, the treatment of the subject by Siddhartha is done in a manner that is thought provoking instead of terrifying. Through his eyes we discover the history of cancer, the many efforts to treat it, and how technology has played a great role in combating this disease.

However, he is quick to underscore the fact that cancer by its very nature is stitched into our genome. A cancer cell is one where its genes have spiralled out of control, and all the switches relating to growth have been jammed on permanently. We can rid ourselves of cancer then, only by limiting the processes in our bodies that depend on growth and regeneration - an impossible task.

He deals with the fact that while we understand much more about the nature and functioning of our cells, and while specific cures have been engineered to fix some of those broken “switches”, the end of cancer is not in sight. This is because cancer itself is evolving. Like a smarter version of us, it finds a way to thwart the cures and keep surviving in the body.

One section describes the greatest cause of cancer (you guessed it) – smoking. Tobacco is a potent carcinogen. Lungs form pre-cancerous lesions from layer upon layer of tar which irritate the membranes - the longer one smokes, the greater the risk of cancer. When the layers of tar and lesions have grown too many, cancer springs up. And then of course, it moves very swiftly, spreads throughout the body and kills you in a gruesome manner.

He concludes the book with some upbeat stories of those who have waged war on the cancer in their bodies, and have lived to tell the tale, thus holding out the hope that as our understanding of the cells in our bodies progresses, and technology improves, we should be able to find more cures which will not be as damaging to the patient’s body as the current ones – namely radiation and chemotherapy. From being a disease that was virtually untreatable at the turn of the century, some cancer cures have progressed to the point that simply taking a pill every day can keep a patient in remission for the rest of his life.

I highly recommend reading this book simply because we will all come face to face with this disease in our lifetimes –  directly or through our friends and family. Understanding its nature will go a long way to removing the horror of the unknown. Buy The Emperor Of All Maladies: A Biography Of Cancer from Flipkart.com

P.S. This review was written by our friend, Firdaus Variava, who divides his time between the video games that he plays at work and being a Daddy Blogger. Jump to his blog by clicking here: Delirious Daddy.