Thursday, November 02, 2006

ME BACK!!!

ashamed as i am to admit it, i read my first bankimchandra novel pretty late in life...actually a couple of weeks ago!! at the risk of sounding irreverent i just have to say ...the dude ROCKS...oh yeah!!contrary to my previous preconcieved prejudices(there arunava...beat that!) he is any thing but slow...in fact its one of the fastest reads in bangla i have encountered in a long time. in terms of readability and grippingness(if there is any such word) he can give any modernday thriller a run for its money. the language is crisp and lucid and astoundingly simple(yes simple,remember bangla prose was at an infantile stage back then)...initially the heavily sanskritized bangla and the interminable compound words flummox one a bit,and the addressing of women by replacing the "a" at the end of their names with an "e" (following the formula of declension of nouns in sanskrit) seems very quaint, ...but you get the hang of it by the fifth page..from then on its smooth sailing. the plots are fantastic,his knowledge of history is mindboggling,his style is racy,fluid,and without any jerks whatsoever,his wit is unparallelled,in one word: UNputdownable.

finished 'kapalkundala' and 'durgeshnandini' in rapid succession..'anandamath' lined up next!!
refrain from cursing me people for boring you with what has been said in a 100 different ways before this....i was so overwhelmed i just had to ...you know...gush!(pretty much like the rustic who waxes eloquent after seeing the metro rail for the first time or something of that sort...you know what i mean)...thanks ma for nagging me until i took down the rachanabali out of sheer frustration!!