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Shakchunni
Shakchunni: a demon from Bengali lore, one who possesses married women. The Great Famine scours Bengal. The once verdant countryside is now a mass morgue. Yet none of that pain seems to touch the Banerjees, the lords of Shyamlapur. They rule their fiefdom with an iron fist and great pomp and pageantry. There is the Raibahadur, his wife, and his two young sons – Narayanpratap, the slender poet- intellectual, and Rudrapratap, boisterous and handsome. When Narayanpratap comes back from London, abandoning his education as a barrister and having been heartbroken by an Englishwoman, Raibahadur and his wife marry him off to a poor girl from a distant village, the ethereally beautiful Soudamini. But on the day of the wedding ceremony, just before a tantrik dies, he sounds an ominous warning. 'The Shakchunni dances tonight. You shall all fall dead like flies.' Soon it starts. Soon it starts. The terror. And a haunting of dark secrets that refuse to stay buried in the past.
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May I Hebb Your Attention Pliss
The wave of liberalization in the 1990s changed forever the face of India. It bolstered the economy. It raised the stock index. It raised hem lines of skirts even more. It led to the growth of the fashion police. And also the moral police. Numbered items became item numbers. To the twenty-two scheduled languages were added C, Cobol, Java. You were either watching sitcoms or starting dotcoms. News became entertainment. Entertainment became news. Terror struck the country -- sometimes in the form of gunmen from across the border and sometimes in the form of Bollywood movies. To SMS-ize – 'It wuz da best of tyms, it wuz da wrst of tyms.' Having been a part of this chaotic revolution in popular culture, blogger Arnab Ray of greatbong.net takes a funny, sarcastic, politically incorrect and totally irreverent look at assorted random stuff including Bollywood C-grade revenge masalas, ribald songs of the people, movie punching, fake educational institutes, stubborn bathroom flushes, unreal reality shows, the benefits of corruption, opulent weddings, brains in toaster ovens, seedy theatres and pompous non-resident Indians. Nothing here is off-limits and no cow too holy. We guarantee it. About the Author: Arnab Ray also known as Greatbong (http://greatbong.net) is one of India's most widely read bloggers, having won the publicly voted Indibloggies "Blog of the Year" in 2006 and 2008. He has written for several media outlets like the Washington Post, Outlook magazine and Indiatimes. He graduated from Jadavpur University as a Bachelor in Computer Science and Engineering and went on to finish his PhD in Computer Science from State University of New York at Stony Brook. He is presently employed as a research scientist and resides in the suburbs of Washington DC.