Book Review – Six Degrees : Game of Blogs

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Price — Rs.349/- 

Pages — 421 


About the Author/s – Never before has this section been more interesting than today ,because this is a story within itself .BlogAdda held a challenge – The Game of Blogs,where bloggers were grouped into thirty teams comprising of 10 bloggers each. They were then given five characters and they had to weave a story with those characters.
They were judged by some of the bestselling authors like Ashwin Sanghi,Natasha Badhwar,Ravi Subramanian,Kiran Manral, Meghna Pant and Raksha Bharadia .

Each member had to write a blog page everyday and it all had to then come together in the form of a cohesive story. All the teams came up with their own distinct stories and writing styles and out of those thirty teams, the top three teams were selected for this book .Hence this book is the labor of love of not one or two but 30 bloggers!

The winning teams and their members were as follows :

1.Team “By Lines ”– Anmol Rawat,Preeti Venugopala,Soumya Verma,Tina Basu,Ashutosh Bhandari ,Paresh Godhwani ,Prerna Maynil and Ramanathan P.

2.Team “Potliwale Baba” – Shoumik De,Srilakshmi I.,Sneha Bhattacharjee,Hemant,Shamim Rizwana,Nirav Thakker ,Tushar,Ritu Pandey.

3. Team “Tete-a-Ten ”– Sharon D’Souza ,Oindrila De ,Anupriya Mishra,Vaishakhi Mishra ,Tinu Menachary ,Gauri Kamath,Ritesh Agarwal,Aayan Banerjee , Raghu Chaitanya .

The Storyline – As I mentioned earlier, all the three teams came up with different stories, so I shall in short mention the characters of each team and the jist in short,team wise .

All were given the following characters- Tara Dutta and Shekhar Dutta a stay at home writer ,Roohi Dutta ,Cyrus Daruwala a  law student ,Jennifer Joseph a photographer  and Arun Ahuja , the Dutta’s next door neighbor .

Team “By Lines ”– The Awakening – Tara Dutta has a successful career in print media ,Shekhar Dutta ,is  a stay at home Dad cum writer and Roohi Dutta is their 9 year old daughter .This one is a science fiction based story with an  interesting alien invasion concept. It cleverly points out the evils of carbon emissions and greenhouse effects too.

I liked the graphic descriptions of the aliens and their super powers and the story stays sharp till the end but the writing style had lot of Deja vu to it.

The best thing — our earth was saved in the end!

Team Potli Wale Baba – Entangled Lives -Here again the characters of Tara Dutta and Shekhar Dutta have similar job profiles. Cyrus is a law student, who also happens to be the illegitimate child of Shekhar Dutta .His love interest is Jennifer Joseph; fiery young Wildlife photographer .The story becomes interesting when the maid of the Dutta household is murdered brutally. Inspector ‘Java “then sets off to unravel the murder mystery.

This one has a great narrative, the characters are all believable and well etched .It is funny at places and fast paced too and keeps you glued to the book till the end. I will not spoil the fun by telling who the murderer was.

Find out the murderer for yourself !

Team Tete-a-Ten –Missing – A Journey Within – Here Shekhar Dutta was supposed to pick up his daughter Roohi from school because his wife Tara had an important meeting ,but Shekhar was late and Roohi goes missing .They post Roohi’s pictures on WhatsApp and Facebook in a desperate attempt to trace her .Jennifer ,a photographer happens to click Roohi inadvertently while completing an assignment  and later through social media realizes that Roohi is a missing child .Roohi was clicked in the company of Cyrus Daruwala .Why was Roohi with cyrus ?What would happen next ? Did Roohi get united with her parents?

These are some of the questions that will be answered when you read the story by Team “Tete-a –ten”.

FINAL VERDICT –  Besides the fact that this was a team effort of a completely novel style , I find the stories to be very original and captivating .Sure , “The Awakening “ being a Sci-Fi thriller , was a little unbelievable and as an adult I do not enjoy such stories much however well written .
I loved the “Entangled lives “ for the fast pace and the characters came out beautifully .It was an absolute page turner for me .

All in all , a great book, definitely worth reading .
I rate it a 4/5

6 Degrees is India’s first book published through collaborative blogging, written completely by bloggers for the Game of Blogs activity at BlogAdda. Know more about Game of Blogs here. You can buy 6 Degrees: Game of Blogs if you liked the review. 🙂