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‘The Midnight Library’ by Matt Haig is the best book I read in 2020. And in 2020, l read a lot of books—as many of you under house arrest (read: lockdown) might have. It’s simply the most beautiful book I’ve ever read. I feel like I might have said that about quite a few books (‘A Man Called Ove’ by Fredrick Backman and ‘Revenge’ by Yoko Ogawa, for instance). But then isn’t that how a great book is supposed to make you feel? Like you haven’t read anything as spectacular in your entire life and that this book is the one that will stay on top of your recommendation list forever.

The Midnight Library is about a girl named Nora Seed who feels trapped in her life. She doesn’t have any close friends, her work doesn’t excite her, and she clearly lacks a purpose in life. And then her cat, Voltaire, dies and she’s fired from her job. Nora feels incapable of doing anything right, and unwanted and unloved. After all, she couldn’t even look after a cat. What hope, really, is there for her?

So, without a solid reason to continue living, she decides to end her life. When she wakes up, it is midnight and she is in a ‘library’ of sorts. The library, with tall pillars and stone façade, is apparently a place between life and death. The books in the library are all different versions of Nora’s life. Each book she picks gives Nora a chance to try out another life. Mrs Elm, Nora’s high school librarian who she used to play chess with, is the guardian of this library and she helps Nora find the ‘perfect’ life she is looking for.

We all have regrets; things we wish we had done differently or opportunities we hadn’t let pass. We find ourselves wondering how our lives would have turned out if we had, say, started saving since high school, cultivated better relationships, or chosen a different career. Our natural tendency is to always want what we don’t have and, as a result, we aren’t as happy as we would like to be. This book makes us rethink our values, see the beauty in little things, and be grateful for what we have.

What I really liked about The Midnight Library, apart from the vignettes of Nora’s different lives and Haig’s simple, smooth prose, is how it makes you contemplate your own life and reevaluate how each of your successes as well as failures have shaped you. I was forced to look at events that I always wished I could undo as experiences that have led to many good things in my life today. Reading the book made me celebrate life and be thankful for all its quirks.

The Midnight Library made me happy, revel in the ordinary, and value everything I have a whole lot more. It is, perhaps, everything I have ever wished for in a book.

Fiction

The Midnight Library

Matt Haig

Published: 2020

Publisher: Canongate Books Ltd

Language: English

Pages: 288, Paperback

Don’t listen to your friends. Mine told me to watch ‘Mismatched’ on Netflix. I did and now, the story is stuck in my head and I can’t get it out. The second season of the series hasn’t been announced yet. Though the producers are likely to do so in the near future, thoughts like “What if they don’t?” and “How long do I have to wait?” are slowly sucking the air out of my universe. The six-episode first season ended on a cliffhanger.

Released on Netflix in November 2020, Mismatched, written by Gazal Dhaliwal, is based on Shandhya Menon’s 2017 young adult novel “When Dimple Met Rishi”. In the rom-com, a girl and a boy are set up to meet (and eventually get married) by their families. The girl, Dimple Ahuja, doesn’t want to “settle down”. She is intent on building her career. However, when she meets Rishi Singh Shekhawat, at a three-month coding program she is enrolled in, the two become friends and eventually fall in love. 

The premise is simple. It’s every other rom-com you have ever watched: Boy meets girl, they fall in love, but then there’s a conflict to spice things up. But what makes Mismatched different is definitely the cast. I liked the actors and their interpretations of their characters. They are all believable and charming in their roles—even the annoying ones.

Dimple, played by one of India’s most popular YouTubers, Prajakta Koli (you might have heard of mostlysane) is fascinating and frustrating at the same time. You see yourself or your friends in her, and then you don’t. You love her, and then you hate her. She is every girl.

It's hard not to be smitten by Rishi—the dashing Nepali actor Rohit Saraf who has been a part of movies like ‘Dear Zindagi’, ‘Hichki’, and ‘The Sky Is Pink’. He is gentle, soft-spoken and kind. He is the friend you want, and the boyfriend you wish you had.

In the role of Professor Sid is actor, MTV VJ, and host of the popular reality show Roadies, Rannvijay Singh. He shines in his role of a sarcastic, no-nonsense teacher who believes in being strict to push his students to be the best versions of themselves. Even if that means he is misunderstood and feared.

And, remember Vidya Malvade who was the captain of the Indian hockey team in the Shahrukh Khan-starrer ‘Chak De India’? In Mismatched, she is a 41-year-old widow trying to start a new life and is back at school. As Zeenat Karim, she is adorable and you wish she had been given more screen space.

Mismatched touches on a few critical issues but doesn’t do any of them justice, choosing instead to focus on Dimple and Rishi and their love story. In doing so, it misses out on telling stories—of a closeted lesbian, and a guy suffering from alopecia, for instance—that could have started important conversations. There is a lot of potential for that, with actors and characters who could have pulled it off with ease. There are also a few glitches and oops moments in the storyline—wrinkles that neither the writer nor the editor thought of ironing out.

However, Mismatched is as entertaining as entertainment can get. With short episodes, you could watch the entire first season in a single afternoon. But be warned, you will spend the rest of the weekend wishing there were more.

Rating: 3/5

Genre: Rom-com

Actors: Prajakta Koli, Rohit Saraf, Rannvijay Singh, Vidya Malvade, Aditi Govitrikar

Director:  Akarsh Khurana & Nipun Dharmadhikari

Run time: Six episodes of 30 minutes each

Margaret Atwood is one of the world’s most acclaimed writers. She is a novelist, poet, essayist as well as short story writer who has won numerous awards and accolades. Though mainly known for her novels—especially ‘The Handmaid’s Tale’ that was made into a television series, and its 2019 sequel, ‘The Testaments’, which won the Booker Prize—you’d be missing out if you didn’t read her poetry collections. I’m not a big fan of poetry but Atwood’s poems strike a chord and make me think.

As Atwood herself puts it, “Poetry deals with the core of human existence: life, death, renewal, change; as well as fairness and unfairness, injustice and sometimes justice. The world in all its variety.” “Dearly” is Atwood’s 12^th poetry collection but her first in over a decade.

Dedicated to her long-time partner Canadian novelist Graeme Gibson who died in 2019, Dearly is a collection of poems that celebrate life. Many of the pieces were apparently written in anticipation of Gibson’s death. He was suffering from dementia.

The poems in the anthology were penned over a period of 10 years, between 2008 and 2019. In the introduction, Atwood says she stored the poems in the drawer, and then when she felt she had enough (to publish), took them out and separated them into sections.

These are poems about memories, loss, ageing and endings, and new beginnings. They are also about everyday objects, routine, and birds and animals. You will also stumble upon love poems about zombies and tributes to women who have been raped and murdered.

The common thread is that all these poems make you reconsider your beliefs and ideas. In fact, there is something about Atwood’s writing that makes you do that—go into this zone from where things look a whole lot different.

Reading Dearly also makes you pay attention to the nature around you as Atwood describes the environment around her, in her hometown in Canada. These poems, inevitably, make you think of the challenges the world faces today—mostly the environmental degradation that we have let go unchecked.

Yet there are also poems you struggle to make sense of. Some don’t really communicate what you feel they are trying to convey. But you still find yourself going back to them to pick up clues you might have missed. That’s the power of Atwood’s writing. She is brilliant at evoking vivid imagery and her poetry is as fine as her prose, if not finer. All in all, Dearly is a sensitive understanding of what makes us human and the way Atwood describes the world makes you fall in love with it a little more.

Poetry

Dearly

Margaret Atwood

Published: 2020

Publisher: Chatto & Windus

Language: English

Pages: 124, Hardcover

Originally produced for a theatrical release in 2019, the Sanjay Dutt-starrer “Torbaaz” had a couple of postponements before it was finally released on Netflix on December 11. It was only natural for a film with the charismatic Dutt as the main lead to draw the attention of this reviewer, who was otherwise already halfway through a recently released Indian series.

So Bollywood’s badass Dutt plays Naseer Khan, a doctor who’s revisiting Afghanistan to volunteer in an NGO that helps displaced children in refugee camps. From the start of the movie, we’re told that Dr Khan has some really bad memories of the place from his previous stay there as an employee at the Indian Embassy.

Khan is traumatized with the memories of Afghanistan, to the point he even dislikes the children there. We later learn that Khan’s wife and son had died in a suicide bombing carried out by a local Afghani boy he knew. But still, being the good Samaritan that he is and with respect for his wife’s humanitarian works, Khan makes peace with his fear and hatred to support the children of a rural Afghan community.

At the camp, he meets some young Afghani and Pakistani boys who have a huge interest in cricket. As an ode to his late son who was a cricket enthusiast and an aspiring player, Dutt decides to become a coach to the children and start a cricket team.

But it’s not as easy a task as he assumes, especially with the entry of the notorious warlord Qazar (Rahul Dev) in the region. Qazar is a Taliban leader who uses children to conduct suicide bombings across the country and is in search of escaped children from Pakistan, who coincidentally are a part of Khan’s cricket team.

Torbaaz’s story and screenplay—although originally written for a Bollywood-level production—seem more to meet the criteria of independent films made for OTT releases. With evidently more budget than these independent films and subjects like cricket and children as suicide bombers that could evoke audience passion, there seems nothing that can go wrong.

Unfortunately, the film’s biggest asset turns out to be one of its pressing liabilities. At the risk of arousing the wrath of Sanjay Dutt’s longtime fans, there’s no better way to say what I am going to: he is a total disaster in the film. This has to be one of his laziest performances where he does not even attempt to get into character. In this film, Dutt is not a distraught father and husband, much less a convincing doctor or a cricket coach. Instead, he’s just the actor Sanjay Dutt reading out a script without bothering to understand his character. Wonder what director/producer/writer Girish Malik was doing through the shooting.

Dutt’s inclusion in the movie also gives it too much Bollywoodish aura—which is not ideal for OTT audiences. Any other actor who doesn’t come with such a large baggage of Bollywood would have fared better, making the entire production seem more mature.

So the child actors who seem to be cast from among the locals in the area perform better under the guidance of acting coach/acting workshop director Mayank Dixit.

Also commendable is Hiroo Keswani’s cinematography. Keswani shows Afghanistan in a different light than what we’re used to seeing. Portrayed in most Bollywood and Hollywood movies as a violent region full of deathly deserts, Afghanistan in Torbaaz gets a more humane, scenic, picturesque touch, almost to the point of it appearing like an attractive tourist destination.

Who should watch it?

Although the film stars Sanjay Dutt, we humbly request his fans to avoid it in order to avoid a big disappointment. Versatility has never been his forte and Torbaaz is definitely not his cup of Afghani tea.

For the rest of the audience, you can at least watch the movie for the children’s efforts and to see an entirely different side of the ‘war-torn’ Afghanistan.

Rating: 2.5 stars

Genre: Action thriller

Actors: Sanjay Dutt, Rahul Dev

Director: Girish Malik

Run time: 2hr 12mins