Week 1521 - A Crazy Jumbled Week

The Concept Explained

Counting Down to 90 - Week 1579

Why 1579

Bhavin's WritingsBhavin Jankharia

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Last week was a bit of a blur especially towards the weekend, when the time came to write this 1521 piece, which I finally go around to putting together yesterday. 

On Monday, I started Flesh by David Szalay - it won the Booker Prize and is interestingly written, but I am not sure of continuing it or finishing it. The characters nowadays, especially set in the white Western world feel quite alien, which is not an issue if it is detective or science fiction, but when the fiction is set in a specific locale as Flesh is, the alienation shines through…unlike say the short story by Madhuri Vijay in the New Yorker, Lara’s Theme, which reads so well, which I also read on Monday.

I also started Sisu hoping to watch it 20 minutes at a time, but when the horse exploded around the 20 minutes mark, I gave up.

On Tuesday, I broke my red wine glass.

On Wednesday, I read a lovely excerpt, almost a short story, by Daniyal Mueenuddin titled “The Golden Boy” set in Islamabad/Rawalpindi. The 1970s setting was so easy to relate to, just around when Bhutto is making a play to become the Prime Minister. 

Thursday was Pluribus episode 5, which set the stage for a big reveal about what keeps the hive going, sometime later this week.

In the morning, near my clinic in the Phoenix market, a fruit-seller tried to palm off fresh coconut water from Thailand…it was being sold in coconut-like plastic containers and when I told him I get fresh coconut water straight from a coconut delivered home by the coconut network, he kept saying…but it is from Thailand.

Friday and Saturday, we finished all the remaining episodes of Mick Herron’s Down Cemetery Road. Emma Thompson is just so good and so is Ruth Wilson. One more episode left later this week, the dramatic season finale, which will see a few deaths. I have read all of Mick Herron’s Slough House books and started this one a couple of years ago but never got around to finishing it, which is nice, because I have no idea what the end is going to be.

I also started Stranger Things Season 5 and made it through 20 minutes of a 1 hour plus episode that almost feels like a film. This is the final season but it is fun to see the cast again after so many years. I had binge-watched the first season when it dropped almost a decade ago and have watched the rest as and when they came out.

Saturday and Sunday were a family weekend, with a cousin coming down from the Bay area via Ahmedabad with a big family lunch at Matunga Gujarati club. These can be exhausting and there wasn’t much energy left for anything, but I managed to view The Toxic Avenger, a nice superhero spoof with Peter Dinklage and Elijah Wood and Kevin Bacon that got over in just about 1 hr and 38 minutes, and was low-brow fun.

All of this, over and above work and cases of the day posts and work-outs and runs and walks. Another week and a little further along the countdown.