Some time back I was happen to stroll into Odyssey a book store in Chennai Adyar area. As it turns out, I started browsing Kuzhali Manickvel’s collection ‘One Smoke’ stories – Insects Are Just Like You And Me Except Some of Them Have Wings. My first reaction was ‘Someone published a (random)blog into a book without much editing’. To my surprise I bought the book.
Insects Are ust Like You And Me...
After reading it at leisure, I find the book really wacky and hilarious. Kuzhali has a healthy disrespect to logic and structure and intense affinity to fatalistic things like death, suicide and such.Sprinkling of South Indian/Tamil culture and slangs makes it more interesting and enjoyable for me.
I was really impressed by Jam That Bread of Life the title itself is a funny corruption of ‘I am That Bread of Life’ written under a Jesus wall picture. Wacky humor apart, it was a subtle commentary on the rote based education system.
The Butterfly Assassins was very interesting irony: An etymologist commits suicide on the eve of asked to vacate his rented house. Butterflies and Killing Jars were effectively used to build the irony up.
The short nature of the pieces gave me the much needed comedy relief during the development of Sim-OnDemand – which I’ll be blogging at length.
