Three Amigos Ride to Spiti by Ketan Joshi

Book Review of Three Men Ride Again: Three Amigos Ride to Spiti by Ketan Joshi

Three Men Ride Again: Three Amigos Ride to Spiti by Ketan Joshi is humorous travelogue about three friends who ride to Spiti on their favourite Royal Enfield bikes. I have to say, I have been waiting for this book. I read everything written by Ketan Joshi who slowly but firmly cemented his position among the English language writers of India. He has written short stories, detective stories and even books on marketing, but his travel stories are just magical, awesome and filled with the most innocent, the purest form of fun. Three Men Ride Again: Three Amigos Ride to Spiti by Ketan Joshi is the second book in the series of Three Amigos travelogue. I read the first book in this series. It was called Three Men on Motorcycles: The Amigos Ride to Ladakh. I liked it immensely. So I couldn’t resist the temptation of downloading the second book, that I found buried under stacks of other Kindle books.

Ketan Joshi’s second book is even better than the first one. The most important improvement being the brevity. When it comes to writing travelogue, Ketan Joshi is simply a genius. Other travel stories that I read over last few years were serious, dreamy-eyed type descriptions of places and people. There are plenty route charts, information on hotels and must-see places. But all these voluminous details and painstakingly laid out travel plans kill the joy of reading the book as a literature. Ketan Joshi’s travel stories are not meant for dry tourist handbooks. They are humorous stories about three friend going on distant places and having a real blast. Read it and you’ll find yourself giggling every now and then.

In Three Men Ride Again: Three Amigos Ride to Spiti by Ketan Joshi, fun starts right from page one. It is not the serious and twisted kind of fun that writers often use to make their works look incredibly smart and polished. It is the boorish, imbecile fun that can only be found among best friends on their intimate moments. I’d kill and maim just to get a moment like that in my life.

Bawa gets airsick easily, so we tried to tell him horror stories about air turbulence and accidents and roller coasters to get him to puke or at least get dizzy; but he was on to us – and stuck his fingers in his ears and shouted ‘nananana’ to drown out our stories. Everyone in the plane stared at us, but we told them that he was a harmless lunatic and we were taking him to Punjab where he would fit in easily.

When the three friends like Delzad, Adi and Ketan are together they hardly need anyone else to have unmixed, consummate fun. The ability to mock oneself is what I consider the most effective form of humour and Joshi’s book is just stuffed with it. The sentences are simple, quite straight-forward yet when you read them, your belly starts aching from laughing hysterically.

Our tummies were so full that bending over to tighten the straps was sto risk apoplexy or a sudden bowel movement.

Who writes like that? Most of the books I read nowadays are so grim and serious, they keep me sad and moody for days. Not that they are badly written, or not interesting, but the problem is that they were too truthful in mirroring the darkness of contemporary society. The writers may be actually good humoured in person, but they have seen too much of the dark sides. That might have choked the fountain of fresh water inside them. I don’t blame them. The world has gone to that direction. A world like this amounts to intellectual asphyxiation. So at times we need to stick our head out of water, inhale fresh air and live a little. Three Men Ride Again: Three Amigos Ride to Spiti by Ketan Joshi is a book just about that.

There are also ocassional mention of historical facts or little details about the Geography. But they are not the text-book kind of facts. The information is presented in a way that even the most absent minded, passive aggressive backbencher, with little or no respect for studies will find it entertaining.

Chail had an even cooler history than Simla. The legend goes that Chail was built is a ‘Fuck you’ gesture by the Maharaja of Patiala to the British.

That’s dry, binary data blended with unique storytelling. If Ketan Joshi had written a text book it would be a superhit among college goers. Education would be fun rather than a burden as it is now felt. Joshi also toys with popular mythology. He tells the stories in different lights.

The story goes that Hidimb was a ferocious demon living in the forest, and Hidimba was his equally ferocious demon sister. They used to go around doing various demon things – eating people and disturbing sages and stuff.

Then one fine morning Bheema comes to that part of the forest and kills Hidimb, the demon. That’s too mainstream.

Demon meets hero, Demon attacks hero, Demon dies.

But what happens after that was rather strange.

On Seeing that her only brother is dead, beaten to death by this fellow Bheema – what does Sister Hidimba do? Does she attack him? Does she bay for his blood? Does she try to kill him?

No! She gets horny! She basically says ‘Ooh... you killed my brother ... that was so hot... Lets fuck!

Adi on these riding trips is on perpetual motion. He doesn’t stop every now and then to admire the sceneries. He loves rough ride like Delzad – the rougher the road, the better. However, he spends huge amount of time taking pictures – not of the places he visits – but of himself and his bike. Delzad, an absolute foodie, shows severe withdrawl symptoms if he doesn’t get to eat Tandoori for a few days. The mix of Ketan, Adi and Delzad often reminds me of another very famous and well-read travelogue – Three Men in a Boat.

The canyons and gorges had been created by the force of the fast running rivers, which, over the eons, had cut right through the soft sedimentary rocks like a string through a boiled egg. The Himalayas are not solid volcanic rock like the Sahyadris – they are made up of sediments of the sea floor which were pushed up when the subcontinent of India crashed into the mainland of Asia and threw up the plateau of Tibet and the giant ripples of the Himayalas.

That’s one piece of Geography lesson, minus the text-book style bombastic and rigormortis like formality.

Ketan is a nature lover and like any true nature lover the slow destruction of all good tourist spots makes him sad. It is not that he is running some propaganda material on ecology or something. It all comes with observation of a clear and unbiased mind of a naturalist. Ketan Joshi is often critical about the unmindful and wholesale destruction of nature.

... what would you expect with a place in India which is holy to two religions? Its twice as ugly and dirty, obviously.

Three Men Ride Again: Three Amigos Ride to Spiti by Ketan Joshi is a book everyone should read. It is not just a good travelogue but also a fairly nice piece of contemporary literature. In the present time of emotional and intellectual deprivation, I find his books strangely soothing. I will be eagerly waiting for the next book in Three Amigos series. The Amigos will ride South - promises Ketan Joshi. This gives a hint on what the next book is going to be about.

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Lurk by Adam Vine Book Review

Book Review of Lurk by Adam Vine

Lurk by Adam Vine is a serious book of consummate horror. The story is about a youth hostel called Sunny Hill where the tenants party hard. The main character Drew Mayhem (Mayhem isn’t his real name), a student of film studies, is a video game lover, a horror freak, therefore overweight. Carter who has a physique like a Greek God is Drew’s role-model. He has a barbie like girlfriend Natalia. There’s Beatriz with spectacular legs. Drew often has bouts of fantasies about Bea. Ray’s one of his best friends. He is also the lover of Beatriz. There is a neighbour Benny, who’s weirdness knows no bounds. There is Skoakland, the cop who is – rather strangely - the only one to respond to a 911 call made from anywhere in that area.

Naturally when you mix up all these ultra-weird characters in a cauldron, you only produce the most terrifying brew - Lurk. To add to the horror, there are passive aggressive soliloquies in italics. Sounds like Stephen King? Well, this book is greatly influenced by Stephen King. I mean, even if you ignore the frequent mention of King’s works like The Shining, It etc, and overlook the italicised inner voices, and swear words, a lot of influence is still visible in the prose style. This is good. We all love Stephen King. The sentences are brief, the dialogues are realistic and there’s hardly a word that is unnecessary.

The plot of Lurk by Adam Vine is complicated. It’s bound to be. The characters are complex. Their relationships are complex. They have things going on under the surface and you can only make intelligent guesses by carefully observing the turbulence above. The number of characters in Lurk tends to infinity, though the minor characters don’t usually interfere with the plot except on 3-4 occasions.

I don’t know where the young students who know nothing better other than partying every single night, actually study. Probably there was a mention of some university somewhere in Lurk, but I don’t remember it right now. These students, almost always dead drunk, explore the basement of Sunny Hill. They find a few photographs. Their subjects keep changing every time Drew looks at them.  They show him the future. They also show him the naked figure of Beatriz masturbating. After seeing this photo and after masturbating to his heart’s content, Drew decides to burn them.

They make a big show of burning the photographs. They hurl abuses to Benny, the neighbour who seems to be indifferent of the world’s choicest curses. Afterwards the corpse of Benny is found. He has committed suicide, it appears. It is later discovered that officer Skoakland was also among the few who resided in Sunny Hill. He was the one of the two surviving members of 93’s Sunny Hill tenants. The other one’s Apple.

There are serial killings, ghosts, mysteries, violence, nightmares – anything that comes under the horror genre –are all wrapped up in between the two covers of Lurk by Adam Vine. I admire his style and presentation, though the influence of Stephen King is visible too much. The book has that exceptional quality of keeping you glued to it, till you finish.

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I’ll Do It My Way The incredible journey of Aamir Khan

Book Review of I'll Do It My Way: The Incredible Journey of Aamir Khan by Christina Daniels

For some reason unknown to myself I avoid reading biographies. I still don’t know what made me download I’ll Do It My Way: The incredible journey of Aamir Khan by Christina Daniels. I think it was because first, it was about Aamir Khan. Though I am not a big fan or anything, I like his unconventional methods. He is always experimenting with film-making.  That is kind of inspiring. Secondly, and most importantly the book was available under Kindle Unlimited. So I could download it for free.

But then as I started reading it, I was surprised at the depth that could only be acquired by a penetrating research. I also wondered what tremendous amount of time and effort made this book possible. I’d like to thank Ms Christina Daniels on that. In Bollywood people write their own stories – autobiographies – that are also sold well. Perhaps this wasn’t possible for Aamir Khan who’s reluctant to say anything about himself. He just does what he does. It is humility, I suppose. Or, may be he’s too occupied in his work. But we are grateful that he at least let other do it.

I’ll Do It My Way: The Incredible Journey of Aamir Khan accounted Aamir’s life starting from his early childhood till the making of 3 Idiots. The journey was long and the book describes it in details without ever being tedious. I consider this an excellent sample of how non-fiction books should be. The book leaves out movies like PK and Dangal because it was written before those films were released.

In her book however, Christina Daniels reproduced verbatim the interviews and opinions of people who were/are associated with Aamir Khan. These interviews are often repetitive and lengthy whereas short excerpts could do just fine.

He had something that trained actors don’t have, which is a certain kind of vulnerability.

Aditya Bhattacharya says. Then he continues dwelling on the word ‘vulnerability’ till the reader feels drowsy. I totally understand that this is not something the author could control. These things could have been avoided by including only the gist of the interview. But then when we select certain portions from a speech, the risk always remains that the words are taken out of context and therefore interpreted wrongly.

The book I’ll Do It My Way: The Incredible Journey of Aamir Khan, unlike most of the biographies, doesn’t go ecstatic over Aamir’s achievements. Christina Daniels, rather tells the facts as they are and let readers make their own judgements. This particularly I liked about the book – the unbiased journalism. Not only does it highlights the successes but also scrutinizes failures.

Dil was the last of a series of films that Aamir signed after Qayamat Se Qayamat Tak. But not all these films lived up to the promise of Qayamat Se Qayamat Tak. Love Love Love and Awwal Number bombed in quick succession, as did Deewana Mujh Sa Nahin and Jawani Zindabad. The subsequent failure of films like Afsana Pyar Ka and Daulat Ki Jung also returned to haunt him. In fact, it was also only in these years that the misses outnumbered the hits.

Christina Daniels also touches a very sensitive subject of remake. This is a common practice among Bollywood filmmakers. I find it really disturbing. I am, under no circumstances, ready to believe that there’s a scarcity of good writers in India. The reason why these people still copy plots from Hollywood is beyond my understanding. After reading how Mahesh Bhatt justifies this in one of the interviews, I was rather shocked and ashamed. Regarding the movie Dil Hai Ke Manta Nahin he says,

On criticism for Dil Hai Ke Manta Nahin as a ‘remake’, I have no quarrel with it. There are people who like to cut it down and deny the film its place in the consciousness of the nation. But they can play only gate-keepers when it comes to allowing that film to get into a privileged section of so called ‘greats’ decided by a handful of critics. Films find immortality in their viewers’ memories. That is where they finally resonate and live.

Don’t know about you Mr. Bhatt but films like these only prove our incompetence. A film Memento is made in Hollywood. Somebody copies it in South India (Surya acts in it) then somebody copies it again in Hindi and names it Ghajni. Should that, as an Indian, make me proud? Why don’t you just put subtitles or simply dub it in different languages? Wouldn’t that be more cost-effective and less shameful? I don’t know.

Now back to I’ll Do It My Way: The Incredible Journey of Aamir Khan. The book not only tells us about his professional life, but also tells you the incidents in his personal life that had direct or indirect impact on his work. It tells you about his love of animals, about his love of reading and also about his painful divorce with Reena. In a professional sphere Aamir has always been bit obsessed about perfection. He had an eye for details. Perhaps that resulted in a rumour about his interference.  

Aamir is a very hard working boy, though you may have your differences with his obsession with perfection.

Says Mahesh Bhatt. But Aamir’s obsession with perfection comes out of his unconditional love and devotion to film-making. In this book Christina Daniels cited numerous examples of that. Here is one.

During shooting, Aamir’s dedication to a perfect performance was total. In one particular legendary instance on the set, the team was shooting a massacre scene that ended with Aamir contemplating a pile of corpses, against the setting of a burning village. The crew noticed a snake moving right towards Aamir. But Aamir remained immobile and deep in thought. In reality, he had noticed the snake, but he did not move because the huts behind him had already been torched for the scene and Ketan had still not called a ‘cut’. By the time the snake was pulled out, it was already beneath Aamir’s legs. The spell-bound audience applauded long and hard.

Now, that’s Aamir Khan for you. Such obsession with work, such saintly dedication and detachment! Is it not only natural that he’ll be misunderstood?

To find answers to questions like ‘Why Aamir Khan doesn’t participate in award ceremonies?’ or ‘What was his stand in Narmada Bachao movement?’ one has to read the book. The book ends with a detailed filmography. There’s also a list of awards won by him. As a bonus, there’s also a list of musical hits from his films. I thoroughly enjoyed reading I’ll Do It My Way: The Incredible Journey of Aamir Khan by Christina Daniels and will also look forward to reading her future publications.

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