Let Love Take Over - Tomson Robert

 :) - Smile is all I was doing while typing the name of the book and the author.

Super proud of you dear Tomson for all the effort you are putting in to conquering the heights you have conquered in the myriad phases of life  and making all of us proud and famous :)

Tomson was my classmate in school , from first to tenth in Kendriya Vidyalaya Ernakulam . In general KVs are known to be the best option for children of government employees with transferable jobs however ninety percent of the students in our batch managed to study in the same class from first to tenth. As a result we share a special bond and like most of us would agree those childhood days are the most colorful and happiest days of our lives ! 

It is indeed my privilege to be able to write a review for a book written by a good friend.

'Let Love take over'  is the third book from Tomson after a collection of short stories in 2016 ( Work , Life and the Balance in between ) and his debut novel in 2019 ( Alumni of the year ).

Easy, simple read with a good story line is how I would like to summarize the book. It's the story of how Joshua , the protagonist fights his inner fear to rediscover the lost hero in himself to face life with a mature outlook. With a perfect blend of narrative description of food , places ,relationships , personalities and corporate lives, the book  challenges you to rediscover the lost 'YOU' and face your fears while being able to let go of the small fights. 

Loved the way the book identified the 'GOLIATHs' in modern day lives and the imperfection in our outwardly perfect lives.

Keep writing !

Becoming - Michelle Obama

Becoming – by Michelle Obama is an autobiographical narration of her life from the South side of Chicago where she lived a very middle-class life in a two bedroom apartment with her parents and brother to the high profile life as the First lady of the United States.

Her well planned and disciplined life, her choices of projects to work on are all inspiration for ladies to plan their life for independence and enable themselves to be the change they want to see in the society. 

The book gives us a sneak peek into the political sentiments and major issues  facing  the American society  as well as the political propaganda driving the Democratic and Republican campaigns.

Michelle Obama describes with equal candor her childhood  days in ‘Euclid Avenue’ in Chicago  when she excelled in school , her college days at Princeton as also her early years of marriage with Barak Obama trying to balance her career with the political ambition of her husband. She has successfully portrayed the transition from Euclid Avenue to White House capturing well the subtle nuances involved in loosing once privacy to popularity and media attention.

Some excerpts from the book that I underlined:

“And If every sadness, when it came , turned out at least to be redemptive in the end.”

“Dominance, even the treat of it, is a form of dehumanization. It’s the ugliest kind of power.”

“You may live in the world as it is, but you can still work to create the world as it should be.”

“Failure is a feeling long before it becomes an actual result. It’s vulnerability that breeds with self-doubt and then is escalated, often deliberately, by fear.”

And the best of all excerpts is :

“I tried to communicate the one message about myself and my station in the world that I felt might really mean something. Which was that I knew ‘invisibility’. I’d lived invisibility. I came from a history of invisibility. I liked to mention that I was the great-great-granddaughter of a slave named Jim Robinson, who was probably buried in an unmarked grave somewhere on a South Carolina plantation. And in standing at a lectern in front of students who were thinking about the future, I offered testament to the idea that it was possible, at least in some ways, to overcome invisibility.”

That according to me is the gist of the Book.

After reading the book , I felt safer to live in this country and have my kids build their life here. With all the negative sentiments against immigrants in this country, the book assured to me that there is still HOPE.