Tuesday, July 15, 2008

Eats, shoots and leaves==Kung Fu Panda

I just finished a book called, "Eats, Shoots and Leaves"....a book about today's usage of English punctuations. Well we can never guess that from the title of the book. The explanation of the title goes something like this. It has been explained in the form of a story.


A giant Panda, enters a bar, asks for a sandwich, eats it happily. The panda was about to leave, when the bar attender asked it, money for the sandwich. It removed a gun out of no where and fired twice in the air and left. Before it left, the panda tossed a animal book to bar attender. An book with descriptions of all the animals, but with poor punctuations. It read, Giant Panda: Animal found in parts of china, feeds on bamboo. Eats, shoots and Leaves.

I have to say, the author of the book Lynne Truss, has read most probably all the books of English punctuations and also history books wherever the word punctuation appear. So much references on each and every page, it makes the reader feel like, he has missed all the books in the world. It also shows how learned she is. Taking nothing away from the book, it does not make one very curious to read the book. Only a persistent voracious reader can finish this book.

The writer is against the way today's generation of people have turned the punctuation symbols and made their own grammar out of them. She goes on and explains how it should be properly used, by explaining how it is wrongly used in today's bits and pieces English. The author throughly disagrees by the way the today's English has been broken up in emails and smses. Like gr8 for great and 10x for thanks. She feels we have to start a revolt against such things.

A through professional with majestic sentence formations skills, spell-binding descriptions with eloquent and free flowing effluent, expressive English. To be frank, I guess you can give this book a miss, if you are looking for humor. It is not as humorous as her "Talk to the hand". The sarcastic comedy of Truss is missing in this one.


To continue with panda story, I saw a movie just yesterday Kung-Fu Panda. An awesome animation movie. Complete opposite to the above english punctuation crap!! Amazing story line, breath-taking animation, stomach aching comedy. Even the expression on the face of the panda makes one laugh his heart out.

The complete setting in china, with Kung-Fu, and all these animals, this movie is here to stay. A complete contrast to the book I read. You see, there is always a lighter side of things in life!!

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