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With all my friends on Facebook giving the thumbs up for Lootera, I was tempted. The good part about living in Melbourne these days is that you also get to watch the latest Bollywood releases in a few theatres. So it was a one-and-half hour train ride to get to my sister’s and the Bollywood buff was eager to pick me up from the station and drive me another half an hour to a theatre in a suburb called Sunshine where we sat for three hours over sinful popcorn, KFC burgers and coke to watch what turned out to be a surprisingly, fresh Bollywood movie. 
Lootera is green and slow, sad and white. In the lush green village of Manikpur in West Bengal, a rich zamindar lives with his only daughter Pakhi in a big property. It is the 1950s and the colossal vitality of the wealth of zamindars is stark. Against the backdrop of an idyllic setting , the zamindar and his daughter lead a quiet pace of life amid the trappings of luxury.
The two share an immense love for each other, a tone which is set in…

I am so in love with Khaled Hosseini. I don’t how he can phrase simple but powerful lines that literally tug at the heart strings. I wish I could write like him.  To me, Kate Holden, Gregory David Roberts and Hosseini are great story tellers in the contemporary world.
When I read Hosseini’s first book Kite Runner, I was gripped by the powerful narrative and the story. A Thousand Splendid Suns was equally good and his third one And The Mountains Echoed is as emotionally gripping as his last two books. It is hard to say which one is the best but if I were to think deep, I think the Kite Runner leaves the sort of impression that refuses to go away from memory for whatever the reason. Maybe it was the novelty of the theme, Afghanistan, the ravages of war and the stark representation of life that hit one. By the time we go into the last two novels, we would have developed a sense of familiarity with the Afghan situation. So there is less surprise, but what still makes me hooked to every p…