History revisited

Manosij Ghosh Dastidar, a student of class V, was distressed because of his inability in making friends.

Along with 60 other children, Manosij, Arkamita and Swarat have recently attended a six-day-long Art of Living workshop called Art Excel (or All-round training in Excellence) organised by South Point school at the school premises. "This course is tailor made for the age group 9-15," informed Bidisha Sen, an ex-IITian-turned-Art Excel instructor for Art of Living.

At the end of the workshop, the likes of Swarat, Manosij and Arkamita were looking as cheerful as children should be. "I’ve started making a lot of friends during the workshop. I don’t feel shy or fearful anymore," said Manosij.

Manosij, Did this really happen? :) Rohit says you were as normal as it gets within the limit of experimental error back then...

Bleach, Alchemy, Jumper...You name it.

I always knew that Japanese didn't have much talent in nomenclature. Try bleach for instance. Its an intricate graphic novel about the dead, alive and the in-betweens. They fight for honour, ascendancy, power...well, to put it bluntly, they fight to justify the tag that Bleach has of an action novel. Add a few teaspoons of romance and friendship and voilà! You have Bleach. I feel that its a reasonable question if someone wonders what prompted the author to call it bleach. Well, the protagonist has orange hair. And as he confides in one of the episodes, he DIDN'T bleach it. Apparently, in the new world order, that's all the reason you need to call something bleach.

You must have heard of full metal alchemist? I love it yes, but I do have complains about its name too. Maybe I am dumb, but I still don't see why you go around naming a guy with two metal limbs, FULL metal alchemist.

We have Jumper next. I liked the movie. So I tried the book. Once you get over the bad English, the naivety of the plot and the writers decisive ability to neglect all loose ends, its a tolerable book. But that holds true for only the first part. In the second leg of the book, he lets loose an avalanche of bad puns and ridiculous sub plots. I mean, you understand that you are witnessing something truly special when you go on reading about a man puking, peeing AND pooping for three chapters straight.
But you can only do it for so long. And so this poor guy cannot jump anymore because he starts...well, doing all of that. What happens now? His wife starts jumping. I completely lost interest at this point.