Ruchira's Ramblings

    Image by Nathan Dumlao via unsplash.com   When I was fifteen, a friend lent me a book. I hadn’t asked her for it, I didn’t even know she had it, but she lent it to me anyway because she had asked me if I had read it and I told her no, but I wanted to. The book was called Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone . To be honest, I didn’t really know how big a deal this book was in late 2002. I had only passingly seen it mentioned once in the weekly children’s page of the English newspaper I used to read as one of those children’s books dismissed and criticized by adults as not real literature. Some months later, there was a review of the film in the Bengali newspaper which said the magic didn’t work because the lead character couldn’t act. (Hey don’t throw stuff at me, okay? I mean, this isn’t even the worst thing they had said about these films in subsequent reviews. I remember when they reviewed the fifth film they actually made up their own plot for it).   And then of course