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The Zen Bistro & Café serves ‘authentic’ Thai Cuisine inside its calm and discreet premise at Bansbari, on the way to Narayanthan. “Food so authentic, you’ll have to double-check whether you’re in Bangkok” — Zen’s Facebook page reads and the many reviews by its customers on the page back it up. Zen’s Pork BBQs, Delicious Shrimps Wrapped in Bacon, Wonderful Crispy Spinach and Spicy Lemon Fish are dishes its customers swear by.

With ample parking space and also easily accessible by public transportation, Zen’s location away from the core city’s hustle makes it an ideal place for a quiet evening dinner or a lazy afternoon brunch.

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Chef’s Special: Tom Yum Soup, Summer Style Papaya Salad, Deep Fried Fish with Panag Sauce

Opening hours 

11:00 am - 10:00 pm

8:00 am - 10 pm (Saturday)

Live Music: Every Friday

Cards: Accepted

For reservations: 014017654

NON-FICTION
The Girl Who
Escaped Isis
Farida Khalaf with
Andrea C. Hoffman
Translated by Jamie Bulloch
Published: 2017
Publisher: Vintage
Page: 206, paperback

In August 2014, Isis fighters gave the Yazidi inhabitants of Kocho village in the mountains of Iraq three days to convert to Islam or ‘suffer the fate of infidels’. They erroneously viewed the Yazidi religion as a form of devil worship. Farida Khalaf, a young Yazidi woman who was then 18, belonged to one of the many families in Kocho who thought converting to another religion was tantamount to dying.

The result: The Isis stormed into their village, and the jihadists murdered all the boys and men including Farida’s father and elder brother. The girls—around 80 of them—including Farida, were forced into a bus, at gunpoint, and sold into slavery at Raqqa, a city in Syria. The women—including Farida’s mother—were taken elsewhere.

What’s worse, for the Isis fight­ers, misogyny is part of their reli­gion. And that made it possible for men to reject the idea of gender equality and enjoy a sense of power over ‘their’ women. They reveled in violent sexual acts that often left women bruised and bleeding. That’s what happened to Farida too. She was repeatedly sold into sexual slav­ery, raped, and beaten senseless when she tried to resist.

But the good news is that The Girl Who Escaped Isis isn’t just a harrowing tale of all that happened to Farida during the time she was held captive. Yes, she talks about the beatings (she lost sight in one eye, and there was a time when she could not walk for two months), and all the sexual torture that she had to go through.

She even narrates the attempted suicide episodes—from cutting her wrist with glass shards to trying to stick her finger into a light-bulb socket—carried out just to put an end to all the rape.

But the book is ultimately the story of a girl who survived the horrors of Isis against all odds. Farida currently lives in Germany and has been reunited with her mother and younger brothers, who were also taken from their village and held captive for months. However, escaping the clutches of Isis wasn’t the end of the fight for Farida.

Even when she was reunited with her surviving family members, the extended community looked down upon her as someone who had brought dishonor to her family by being raped. Even the name Farida Khalaf is a pseudonym, adopted to protect herself and her family from further shame.

What makes you unable to put the book down though is the way human spirit shines through the ordeals. Farida defies her captors from the get-go and she fights them every chance she gets and with every ounce of strength she has. Maybe Farida’s father, who was a soldier on border duty between northern Iraq and Syria, and who taught her how to shoot a Kalashnikov when she was just 15, had fired up her ‘fight’ rather than ‘flight mode.

This early life lesson was perhaps why she was able to bear the torture without letting it defeat her, even when things seemed far beyond her control. Farida worms her way into your heart with her fighting, screaming, kicking ways. You realize that in a similar situation you would have long given up and that makes you cheer for her unwavering spirit even more.

POETRY

Love Her Wild

Atticus

Published: July 2017

Publisher: Headline

Page: 225, hardback

Rupi Kaur made social media poetry popular, but it’s Atti­cus, an anonymous Canadian poet currently living in LA, who didn’t even set out to be a poet, who seems to enjoying its bene­fits too. He has hundreds of thou­sands of followers on Instagram and celebrities like Shay Mitchell and Alicia Keys are reposting his poems, and even Emma Robert’s online book club, Belletrist, often uses them on its feeds. Apparently, Atticus only started writing poetry after a chance meeting with actor Michael Madsen (of ‘Kill Bill’ and Reser­voir Dogs fame), who told him that reading and writing poetry was what saved him from ‘addiction’ and depression. Now, poetry is how he makes sense of the world, writes Atticus on his introduction on his Instagram page. And reading ‘Love Her Wild’, or even occasion­ally dipping into it, will make you realize that his poetry can help you do the same.

The effects of poetry are mani­fold. For some, it might work like a mantra that gets them all pepped up, for others it might be able to provide comfort in the most trying of times but what it always does is come to your rescue just when you need it. As Atticus writes, “Poetry’s magic is that it is found when it’s needed”.

In Love Her Wild, a collection of new poems with some of the old ones on Instagram, the young poet writes about romance, the highs of love, and heartbreaking lows of life among many other emotions. And he writes with such finesse that sometimes a single line is enough to get you through a partic­ularly bad day. If you haven’t discov­ered Atticus yet, we’d say it’s about time you did.

In all these movies, the makers deliver on the promise of the prem­ise. They play on characters’ para­noia and keep peeling off the murky layers towards the big reveal at the end. But Baaghi 2 delivers paranoia of a different kind. The kind that assaults audience with excruciat­ingly high-strung action sequences synced to earsplitting background scores. These tactics of director Ahmed Khan are clearly overdone.

The plot: Military man Ranvir Pratap Singh aka Ronnie (Tiger Shroff), who is serving at the Kash­mir border, gets a call from his for­mer lover Riya (Disha Patani) out of the blue. Riya sounds distressed and wants Ronnie’s help. She doesn’t get into specifics but this is enough for Ronnie to take a one week leave from his base and travel all the way to Goa to meet her. There, Riya reveals to Ronnie the kidnapping of her daughter two months ago. She has exhausted all options and the police are to shut the case for lack of leads. Now it’s up to Ronnie to help Riya find her daughter.

Choreographer-turned-director Ahmed Khan is least bothered in taming Tiger Shroff, so he lets him loose. Shroff is given every possi­ble opportunity to showcase his dance moves and combat skills. It would then be redundant to point out that the story is driven not by its protagonist but according to the convenience of its star. Shroff is an ideal action star and above all this is an action thriller. He looks intensely charged up in action sequences and one can only imagine the hours it took to choreograph and shoot them with precision.

Pushing the central story in the backseat in favor of spectac­ular stunts makes the movie lose its urgency and purpose. Going back and forth to show the back­story of Ronnie and Riya’s doomed romance, and loaded with unnec­essary fight sequences and dance numbers, the actual investigative element of the story gets a short shift. When it dawns that they’ve wasted big chunk of screentime without moving the plot, Ahmed Khan and his writers all-too-con­veniently drop clues right in front of Ronnie that he can tail. I was left thinking: why didn’t they make Shroff’s character a shrewd investi­gator rather than a killing machine? That would have been a more fitting characterization.

As Shroff enjoys center-stage, seasoned actors like Manoj Bajpayee, Randeep Hooda and Deepak Dobriyal make do with whatever little elbow room they get. Hooda in particular has a few good scenes where he keeps the tone of the movie light and playful. And it’s great to see Prateik Babbar return to acting after his trouble with drug addiction. Ironically, though, he plays a coke addict.

Whatever substance Baaghi 2 misses, it tries to cover up with elaborate action scenes. A refresh­ing spin on the traditional action hero template would have given us a better movie. But at two hours and twenty-five minutes, the final product feels overstretched and endlessly boring for a straightfor­ward action thriller.

Two stars