I’m not a Hindu.

 

I started off as one, when I was very little. My father told me stories of gods and monsters and I always found them fascinating. I always had fun listening to them and I was always excited by how clever the gods were compared to those dumb demons.

 

But as I grew up, I began questioning things about religion. It started off as random, but interesting questions, like…

 

Where does god stay?

 

What does he do all day?

 

Who gives him food?

 

Does he ever pick his nose?

 

Also, if there are different religions, where the hell are gods from other religions living (No, I never, for a second thought that my religion was the one true religion and followers of other religions were going to burn in hell for being faithful to their religion)?

 

But then the questions began to evolve.

 

If God is that powerful, why doesn’t he stop all the bad guys from doing bad things?

 

Wait, why did he make bad guys in the first place?

 

When did we decide he was a ‘he’ and not a she?

 

At which point I decided, you know what, these questions are too heavy for me, and I’d rather not answer them. These questions exist, and clearly, there are no real answers. So, it’s probably safe to assume that the question - whether or not god exists - should be a question we only deal with when we die, and we’re in the afterlife. We’d probably have a better understanding of things then.

 

I think these questions pissed my father off a fair bit, but that’s a story for another day.

 

Anyway, from this point on, it was pretty easy to get to -- God clearly is a made up entity because humans obviously have an innate need to believe that we have to come from somewhere. It’s not enough that we were born from (more or less) loving parents, we need some kind of magical entity sitting in the sky, birthing humans and overlooking the whole thing.

 

For the past, many years, this is what I’ve known. Not ‘believed’, known.

 

Humans have lived at least 2,80,000 years more than any of today’s gods have.

 

That number, 2,80,000 years, that’s just a random number I picked up. Humans have lived far longer than that.

 

Just to give you some perspective, Hinduism, apparently, has been around for less than 5000 years.

 

So, really, what logical reason do you have to believe in gods?

 

And because of all this information about the non-existence of god, my life has felt…

 

No different.

 

The existence or lack of the existence of god, literally, has no effect on how humans behave. I’m still the same, petty, stupid, self-centered human being I was when I still believed in god. There are even bigger assholes out there in the world. Life goes on.

 

And yet, the fact that arguments about god, on several occasions, has led to groups of people cutting, maiming, beheading people, and raping women, even. This is shocking. It reprehensible. It’s fucked up.

 

I know of many Hindus who are quite vocal about how they want Muslims to suffer. I don’t know many Muslims, but I’m certain a large portion of them want Hindus to suffer as well.

 

We’re living in a fucked up world, where imaginary entities in the sky are making people hurt each other.

 

I don’t know what to make of this.

 

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Published originally in the newsletter that I send out monthly. If you wish to subscribe to it, here's a link.

 

The problem a lot of people have with comic books is that they don’t understand how it works. Which is pretty stupid, because it’s a comic book. It’s not that hard to understand. But I guess the problem comes when you sit down to write one. It’s hard, and not very intuitive, and when you hold the finished product in your hands, you wonder where it all went wrong.

 

I know this because I was shit at it when I started writing comics. I’m shit at it today too, but maybe slightly less shitty than I was back then.

 

Shiv Panikker is a film maker. I’m assuming most of his experience comes from working on films. His film experience however does not translate very well to comic books. Which is sad, because The Stuntman is a fairly decent story. What doesn't work for it is the creator's experience in writing comics and the result of that is Stuntman isn't a very good comic.

 

A stuntman who’s broken one too many bones and can’t work as a stunt man anymore decides to write a book. As he dives into writing he book, strange occurrences begin to happen. A missing girl returns from the dead, possible possessions begin to occur, and this leads our protagonist, Johnny, to investigate.

 

The story is solid. But there’s just too much happening on each and every page, and we’re not given enough time to take in these events. There are time jumps, there are scene jumps, we see something happening and immediately cut to something happening in the past and we’re left wondering what the hell is the point of all of this. Conversations seem too choppy, random characters are introduced and almost immediately taken off page, only to be introduced much later in the comic. The whole thing is just too messy to read, and that takes away from the experience.

 

Perhaps if Shiv hired a comic book writer to work on the thing, the comic could have been in much better shape.

 

From what I understand, this is his second comic, Gone Case being the first one. I don’t know if he plans to write any more comics. If he does, I hope he gets some help.

 

The art on the book is pretty good. Warrens Rojas and Jao Perez have done fine work on the book and it looks nice.

 

The lettering is a whole other thing to deal with. It's not very nice, and leaves a lot to be desired.

 

Overall, I think the comic could have been much better, just in terms of readability really, but they did what they did, it is what it is.

 

This is a story about a man with a rope, that also turns into a stick. And the story about a world (?) famous magician who wants to know this trick, of turning a rope into a stick. A man who will go to any lengths to find out the trick. Including murder.

 

Right off the bat, I get the feeling English isn’t one of the writer’s biggest strengths. Which is fine. We’re a land of many languages and it’s hard for people to master a language that isn’t their primary language. I haven’t been able to talk Marathi at all, even though I have never lived anywhere other than Bombay my whole life.

 

So, language isn't my complaint. But if English was not their first language, perhaps they could have hired a language editor, or even written the story in another language. That maybe would have given me one less thing to worry about.

 

This problem with language is, it kept dragging me out of the story a lot. I wasn’t able to focus on what was most important for the book, the story. And I suspect a lot of my gripes with the comic is because of the language. Panel to panel, page to page, the continuity of the comic book was broken because of this language problem.

 

Then there’s the story itself. This is perhaps is a good story. But it probably needed to be told very differently.

 

There were many, many little things that contributed to it being a bad story. The transitions between scenes are handled quite badly. The individual scenes themselves aren't handled very well either. And all this results in a giant mess of a book that doesn't really do anything for me.

 

Look, the srory is pretty dull, when I really think about it. It's simply a story about a man trying to learn a rope trick, and he goes to some really messed up lengths to find out how the trick is done. Which, seems implausible. A man wouldn't spend that much time and those many resources to learn a simple trick, really. Killing people to learn something like this just seems like too much. Had the story explored a bit more of this villain, given him more time to breathe on the page and made some sort of effort to explain why he's so evil, perhaps it would have been a little more believable.

 

A combination of bad storytelling and some really surprising story descision leads to a rather dull, half thought out story, that doesn’t make a lot of sense. The book fails rather miserably, as a book.

 

The art, however, is pretty good. Sachin Nagar, I think, is rather adept at handling the art duties on the book and does a stellar job of bringing this world to life.

 

The book looks great, there's no doubt about that. But great art doesn't fix a bad story. A lot of work was needed in fixing the story and all its problems.

 

In anticipation of the Netflix show, I picked up the rather popular Cixin Liu book, The Three Body Problem. Sitting myself down in my room, alone, I read the rather tedious book, all 85% of it. And then I put the book away.

 

It's not a book I intend to revisit, at all.

 

The book reads like a very dry account of what happens, both in the past and in the now. And, as I read the book, I found it more and more difficult to latch on to any one character as the protagonist, I found it hard to experience the world of the three body problem as something tangible.

 

As a result, my experience with the book was not very nice.

 

Now when I sit back and think about the book, I remember fragments of it, rather clinically. There's nothing binding me to the book emotionally. And I suspect, given time, I'll probably forget the book soon.

 

The book starts in the past, with a girl’s father being killed for what he believes in -- western science. He was beaten to death and that a pretty horrible way to go.

 

But then the book switches back and forth between the past and the present, with the girl growing up to work at a military camp somewhere in china, to the present day, where a character starts seeing a countdown before his eyes, to a character playing a video game.

 

All this dropping of characters, taking up new ones and telling a little story about them, then abandoning that too, this goes on for quite a while, and it’s very confusing. It sort of, formed a giant mess of sorts in my head. Not in a story sense, but in a sense that I wasn’t very clear where the story was going.

 

I knew about the aliens, and that the earth was going to be invaded in the next four hundred years, but I sort of lost track of that and was too caught up in the lives of these ordinary people and it eventually got to a point where it was too boring to really sit down and finish the damn book.

 

I quit at around 85%, which is a significant portion of the book, really. I probably shouldn’t have quit, but the effort was just too much. I had no choice.

 

Reading shouldn’t feel like a task, the experience shouldn’t feel unappealing. And this fun is what I missed while reading this book.

 

The Three Body Problem is a rather tedious book. There’s barely any science fiction in it. I suppose its hard science fiction (I suppose), but the story is so dull and boring, I just couldn’t bring myself to finish the book.

 

And then I watched the Netflix show, which is, well, something else, really. I did a short review of it up here on YouTube. Go watch it here.

 

Anyway, I’m reading other books now. So, all is well with the world again.

 

Taranath Tantrik and Other Tales From the Supernatural should have been a great book about the famous Tarnanath Tantrik. His dealings with the evil forces of the dark, with forces beyond the comprehension of any ordinary mortal.

 

Taranath Tantrik should have been an Indian John Constantine, long before John Constantine was John Constantine.

 

This book had a great premise and ample opportunity to be something spectacular. It’s a book that promised mystery and intrigue.

 

It’s a book I should have had fun with.

 

I did not.

 

Taranath Tantrik and Other Tales From the Supernatural is an expensive purchase and a waste of every paisa spent. It’s a waste of time. I would recommend this book to exactly no one.

 

The book has two stories of Taranath Tantrik that border on the mediocre. Taranath goes and meets these magic teachers to learn from them. Then, stuff happens to him. The supernatural, sort of, approaches him, but then backs away and nothing really substantial happens in the story. I suppose it’s something like a Lovecraftian horror tale, in which true horror is only hinted at, and all we get to see is the effects of the horror and how it takes a toll on humans. But Taranath Tantrik barely does that well. It’s, underwhelming.

 

I’ve watched the show directed by Q, even read the comic Shamik Dasgupta wrote a few years ago. Both were indicators of a series that promised a good supernatural yarn. But the original stories have no meat on them for me to chew on. There’s literally nothing in the book for me to like.

 

The book didn’t really leave an impression on me. In fact, I’ve practically forgotten what’s happened in the book, just a month after I’ve read it. The mark of a good book is when it makes you think about the events of the book, long, long after you’ve read the last line in the book and put it down. And Taranath Tantrik had the opportunity to do that. It didn’t.

 

The other stories in the book, about ghosts, and hauntings, or something, I can’t remember, are just the same. The book left me mostly unsatisfied.

 

Bibhutibhushan, apparently, wrote only two Taranath Tantrik stories in his life time. His son continued the tradition after him and wrote some more stories. I don’t exactly know how those stories are, but after reading this book, I’m a little hesitant to read the next one.

 

And, here’s the thing. I’ve read supernatural books of the time, by other authors. And they’re all the same, mostly. The supernatural elements are there throughout the story, certainly, but they’re somewhat underwhelming and never really take center stage. I don’t know if it’s a thing writers did back then, where they focused on the living more than the dead.

 

Which makes me question my own tastes.

 

Is Taranath Tantrik and Other Tales From the Supernatural really a good book, and am I too stupid to actually appreciate it for what it is?

 

Maybe.