That close

I am not sure if I will see this play,  but it was good to take this photograph on my phone that close to the theatre during the Christmas Bank holiday,  when the roads were empty. It felt like a ghost city,  as a news article quoted.

The Cursed Child

Harry Potter and the Cursed Child – Parts One and Two

As I updated earlier,  here are my views about this book. I got this because

a) I love HP series and am a fan of the Wizarding world

b) I wanted to treat myself the other day after a hard and tiring hour of window shopping (you can roll your eyes if you want to 😉 , but that is indeed a very tiring thing for me to do)

Now after reading the book how do I feel ?

Disappointed.

Wasn’t I happy to get back the Wizarding world and all that it entails and be part of this lovely family whom I love so much? Yes, that is precisely the reason I got this book and read it too. But I am miffed that the marketing got the better of me by selling me a book which is worth only 150 pages max if you include all the pagination and paragraph alignment etc for double the page size and double the money. Even with the series, I wasn’t happy when the story was all drawn out and dragged to include more pages. This isn’t even part of the series. The underlying story is very very simple. And yes, it sounded more like a fan fiction than anything else actually. And it had lots and lots of time travel, a concept which I am not a fan of. And getting my head around it was so confusing and well… I wish they hadn’t been on that for so long. Some dialogues were good, no doubt.

The father son relationship part  was OK. Unusual friendships – expected. Many scenes from the series were revisited (of course they had time travel right?) which was good in a way, but after a while, you feel that it is all there to it. If you remove all those, there isn’t much actually. I feel that there isn’t much of a value add to the whole series. As a play I don’t know how it would be, but if it was just that, then I guess I would have been OK. But promoting it as the next  in the Series, well … I don’t think that is fair. Would I watch the play after this? Nope… Don’t think so. It might have been done very well, but now I got the images of how things would be in my head and I don’t want those to be altered by the play version. If they make a movie and bring back the same kind of scenes as earlier and revisit it, well…that I might watch.

To be fair, they did market it as the play and not a fiction so I guess I should not have had high expectations, but I didn’t expect that half of it would have been a reminder of the scenes from earlier books. That was what annoyed me more. There is a rumor that there are three more books. If they are going to be about the children of the trio, I wouldn’t be as interested in them as I was in the original HP series. I always wish that people would leave a successful series be and not try to keep going on with it. It kind of loses its charm for me after a point.

Goodreads rating: 3/5 (because of my loyalty towards the series)

Waiting…

Whenever I cross this place, I wonder when I will be going in to watch the play. I tried to book it in this time, but it was all full and the only slots available were in end of August (I am leaving coming Monday) . So I decided to wait until the craziness would die down. But with more spoilers coming in, I wonder if it is a wise decision to put it off until later. Also heard that there might be a movie that might be made  based on this play. Wonder how that will turn out.

This waiting game sucks…(and yes, I am talking about Game of Thrones too…book and series) 

Another play area

Another place for the kids to play for a while. It is in a mall and costs around Rs150 per hour on a weekend and Rs100 on a weekday. I am really running out of places to take them and they want new places everyday to play 🙄

Explorium

Today was a busy day. I took my niece to a newly opened Girias Children’s Explorium here in Bangalore. The name sounds like the movie title Mr. Magorium’s Wonder Emporium, a movie I love. It had a combination of science and fun.  Definitely not as big as the Exploratorium I visited in SFO. But still pretty impressive given the limited space. This was sort of a test run for when my other niece and nephew arrive here in a week. My niece loved this place and was reluctant to leave even after 2 hours. I was the one who was tired even though I didn’t do anything except take photographs and keep an eye on her.