Kitabkhana

In case you hadn't noticed...

2009-08-25T23:54:00.002+05:30

...Kitabkhana's pretty much served its purpose, and I've moved on. Thanks for all the fish, as Douglas Adams would have said. If anyone wants to get in touch, I'm at Akhond of Swat.

From 'Mem, mem' to memoir

2007-08-20T23:30:00.000+05:30

This is a remarkable story, and a compelling piece of writing.

The writer Paul West suffered a massive stroke that caused global aphasia. As his wife records:

"The author of more than 50 stylishly written books, a master of English prose with the largest working vocabulary I’d ever encountered, a man whose life revolved around words, he had suffered brain damage to the key language areas of his brain and could no longer process language in any form. Global aphasia, it’s called — the curse of a perpetual tip-of-the-tongue memory hunt. He understood little of what people said, and all he could utter was the syllable “mem.” Nothing more."

Paul West forced his way through the aphasia. Three years later, he had completed a book, perhaps "the first aphasic memoir" ever.

From The Shadow Factory:

There was a bewildering assortment of false starts and incomplete sentences for the mind only. I no sooner thought of something to say to myself than I forgot it, and I was lucky to get beyond the second or third imagined word....
I formed the habit of forcing language back on itself, beyond even its failure to communicate anything at all, to see what was there. Language, at least as we know it, had ended, and I was left there on countless occasions, with something like a white sheet of dental floss or a carnivorous absence. There was nothing beyond. So I cheered myself up by taking as my starting point the notion that all I had to do was pass the zone of no known language and automatically be speaking English once again. These are mental compensations to be sure, but they serve superbly in times of need.

Ever been to Khaufpur?

2007-08-20T23:16:00.000+05:30

Go visit. Khaufpur, a fictionalised version of Bhopal, is where Indra Sinha sets his novel, Animal's People.

From Lucy Beresford's review in The New Statesman:

Nearly 20 years ago, Khaufpur was devastated by a chemical leak at a factory owned by an American firm, referred to by Khaufpuris as "the Kampani". Thousands died during what has come to be known as "That Night", including Animal's parents. Two decades on, women still carry the toxins in their milk, and Animal is condemned to walk on all fours after the poisons attacked his body and froze his spine. Physically deformed he may be, and the butt of much peer contempt, but he is still human - a sentiment he strenuously denies until the book's close.

From Indra Sinha's website:

ANIMAL'S PEOPLE is dedicated to our friend Sunil Kumar, who died in July 2006, aged 34. It had been dedicated to him from the moment I began writing it five years ago. He didn't live to see it published.
Some of the stories Sunil told me about his life found their way into the novel, however the character of Animal is entirely fictional, as are his antics. Following reports in the BBC and elsewhere that the book chronicles Sunil's life, I want to make it clear that it doesn't - although Animal's ability to live on 4 rupees a day (£0.05, €0.07, $0.10) and his sense of humour were certainly inherited from Sunil.

Spend a little time if you drop in at Khaufpur. Browse the classifieds, which include remedies for "sex problems", chakra balancing experts, relief for back pain and neck pain, and this: "Caring for all breathing difficulties, other ailments related to the poison disaster Hills Clinic, Dr Arshad." Don't miss the 'What's On' section, where alongside tantric painting exhibitions, sarangi performances and a screening of Mughal-e-Azam, there's this: " Bob Scheinfeld, Busting Out Of The Poverty Trap. Top US coach shares the secrets of self-empowerment and wealth creation. Few seats left, all tickets Rs 15,000."

Book bookcases

2007-08-20T23:06:00.000+05:30

No, that's not a typo. Thanks to the Marginalien, I now know what to do with those hardbound copies of the prime minister's 100 most boring speeches. They're going to the incredibly creative Jim Rosenau, who--well, go and find out. This is the page where you discover the dirty little secrets behind the Humpty Dumpty Story.

The "We Know It When We See It" Department

2007-08-01T23:28:00.000+05:30

Been reading about "slipstream literature" with some bemusement. No one seems to know how to define it, but everyone knows what it isn't. It isn't the Dead White Guys Club, it isn't the Literature Sorted by National Flag garbage ("and now ve celebrate the undiscovered gems of bad-tempered birdsong translations into a folkloric template from Vanuatu--truly one of our lost classics, it's such a great pity there are only two readers in the world for this sort of thing"), it isn't the Chicklit/ Schlock Is Great Literachoor, Ya Sucks Boo argument.

Ron Drummond has helped compile a Working Slipstream Cannon, though, and now I know what they mean--"Slipstream" is code for "we're spying on the Babu's bookshelves". Here's the top 25:

The Core Canon of Slipstream

1. Collected Fictions (coll 1998), Jorge Luis Borges
2. Invisible Cities (1972, trans 1974), Italo Calvino
3. Little, Big (1981), John Crowley
4. Magic for Beginners (coll 2005), Kelly Link
5. Dhalgren (1974), Samuel R. Delany
6. Burning Your Boats: Collected Short Fiction (coll, 1995), Angela Carter
7. One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967, trans 1970), Gabriel Garcia Marquez
8. The Ægypt Cycle (1987-2007), John Crowley
9. Feeling Very Strange (anth 2006), John Kessel and James Patrick Kelly (eds.)
10. The Complete Short Stories of J.G. Ballard (coll 2001)
11. Stranger Things Happen (coll 2001), Kelly Link
12. The Lottery and Other Stories (coll 1949), Shirley Jackson
13. Gravity's Rainbow (1973), Thomas Pynchon
14. Conjunctions 39 (anth 2002), Peter Straub (ed.)
15. The Metamorphosis (1915), Franz Kafka
16. The Trial (1925), Franz Kafka
17. Orlando (1928), Virginia Woolf
18. The Castle (1926), Franz Kafka
19. The complete works of Franz Kafka
20. V; (1963), Thomas Pynchon
21. Nights at the Circus (1984), Angela Carter
22. The Best of Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet (anth 2007), Kelly Link and Gavin Grant (eds.)
23. The Heat Death of the Universe and Other Stories [UK title Busy About the Tree of Life] (coll 1988), Pamela Zoline
24. Foucault's Pendulum (1988, trans 1989), Umberto Eco
25. Sarah Canary (1991), Karen Joy Fowler

Psst... wanna take a look at my slush pile?

2007-08-01T23:01:00.000+05:30

The 2007 Bulwer-Lytton bad writing contest results are in; the winner says he has an edge because he's an academician:

Gerald began--but was interrupted by a piercing whistle which cost him ten percent of his hearing permanently, as it did everyone else in a ten-mile radius of the eruption, not that it mattered much because for them "permanently" meant the next ten minutes or so until buried by searing lava or suffocated by choking ash--to pee.

Jim Gleeson

Also check out the genre submissions--this won the Children's Fiction bad writing award:

Danny, the little Grizzly cub, frolicked in the tall grass on this sunny Spring morning, his mother keeping a watchful eye as she chewed on a piece of a hiker they had encountered the day before.

Dave McKenzie

From the desk of the Babu, please register one numbers laugh, hollow. This is GOOD stuff. I would publish the Grizzly story, especially if we could tie up with bookstores to offer an "Guess What's Eating Gaurav" Grizzly free with each copy. On the other hand, after a mere six months in publishing, the slush pile creepeth up every dayeth. Once in a while you find an interesting project that comes from a complete stranger, but I'm beginning to understand why most publishers' offices are surrounded by barbed wire and why the receptionist carries a stun gun and tranqs.

I can't name names, but let's just say that the poet of the NorthEast who has so far sent in six books of poetry, all of them weighing in at about 250 pages each and written in impenentrably blank verse, needs to stop calling herself the Bad of the North-East. It's Bard... no, actually, let that stand.

What's in the box?

2007-08-01T01:56:00.000+05:30

At AlterNet, Vanessa Richmond interviews young Canadian writers and asks what the writing life is really about. All of you out there who would be writing great novels if it wasn't for the job at the bank, consider what Anne Stone once did for a living:

Anne Stone:

"I have actually written porn. I worked for a doctor who also ran a modeling agency and occasionally a depanneur. And he would just speak into a tape and send it home with me, and suddenly we were at page 600. And it became weekly that he would take me out for lunch and send me home with tapes. And he used to give me gifts in this box to thank me, and I never looked in, and I gave it to a friend and told him he could have it as long as he didn't tell me what was in the box."

It's true

2007-07-21T06:47:00.000+05:30

The bootleg version of HP&TDH that's been floating around is the real McCoy. Just heard from a friend who *sigh* waited in line. He downloaded the pirated version a couple of days ago, and he says the images are from the deluxe version.

Michiko hearts Harry

2007-07-20T04:42:00.000+05:30

Michiko Kakutani breaks the embargo:

a copy of which was purchased at a New York City store yesterday, though the book is embargoed for release until 12:01 a.m. on Saturday

And writes Rowling a love letter. [Warning: There be spoilers.] Excerpts:

..monumental, spellbinding epic, 10 years in the making, is deeply rooted in traditional literature and Hollywood sagas — from the Greek myths to Dickens and Tolkien to “Star Wars.”
[..]
While Ms. Rowling’s astonishingly limber voice still moves effortlessly between Ron’s adolescent sarcasm and Harry’s growing solemnity, from youthful exuberance to more philosophical gravity..
[..]
This same magpie talent has enabled her to create a narrative that effortlessly mixes up allusions to Homer, Milton, Shakespeare and Kafka, with silly kid jokes about vomit-flavored candies, a narrative that fuses a plethora of genres (from the boarding-school novel to the detective story to the epic quest) into a story that could be Exhibit A in a Joseph Campbell survey of mythic archetypes.

In doing so, J. K. Rowling has created a world as fully detailed as L. Frank Baum’s Oz or J. R. R. Tolkien’s Middle Earth, a world so minutely imagined in terms of its history and rituals and rules that it qualifies as an alternate universe..

Escapist

2007-07-11T00:00:00.000+05:30

We sent around the Guardian's Great Escape links, which feature various writers on the topic of the books they read while travelling. (Part 1, Part 2; and note that the links on the Guardian's page are bad - someone forgot t include the '.co.uk' bit, which we didn't notice until Divya pointed out the error.) Weighing in: Bill Bryson ("I read the Archer as well, of course, and am not too proud to say that I was grateful for it, too. In fact, after Pnin and the telephone directory, it was one of my favourite reads of the trip."), Kiran Desai, Dave Eggers, Pico Iyer, Ian McEwan, Jan Morris, DBC Pierre, Ian Rankin, Paul Theroux, and many others.

Naturally, we began thinking of books we have read while on the road. And found that none really came to mind. We tend to buy magazines when we travel, because we usually wind up looking out of windows, people-watching, sketching or writing when we travel. This despite packing in several books on each trip.

But perhaps your mileage (heh) varies. Care to leave a note?

(Cross-posted.)

Books I shouldn't want to publish...

2007-04-22T12:45:00.000+05:30

... but that I wish I had. Any writer who can use the phrase "boughten woman" is okay by me.

More lurid pulp fiction covers at the sadly defunct Cover Art Gallery.

The author's slice of the pie

2007-04-22T12:36:00.000+05:30

Jonathan Heawood has an interesting perspective on publishing:

While readers have an interest in seeing a wide range of high-quality writing for all tastes, and authors have an interest in a marketplace which can generate income from their idiosyncracies, the print market itself is geared towards promoting ever smaller numbers of increasingly conventional titles. Whether readers get their content in black ink on a white page, blue text on a grey screen or white chalk on a black board is irrelevant. As Clare Alexander pointed out, authors aren't in the paper business, they're in the communication business....
...If conventional publishers, agents and retailers want to find an answer to this question, they are going to have to stop defending the status quo. The present dispensation is a historical accident. These particular middlemen arrived on the scene over the last few hundred years, whenever the industry became richer, at the same time that new copyright controls were imposed as each new player - agent, publisher, retailer - sought to defend their slice of the pie. The pie has grown, but so have the number of slices. The only player with a diminishing slice is the author.

Raj Redux

2007-04-22T12:32:00.000+05:30

William Dalrymple in the NYRB:

Two new books on the British in India, both of them sophisticated works by established scholars, demonstrate how polarized the debate has now become. For Nicholas Dirks, who concentrates on the India of the East India Company, the British Empire is a terrible blot on world history comparable to slavery and fascism; to be neutral or even balanced on the issue is to tolerate the intolerable, and even to become complicit in oppressive violence and tyranny. For David Gilmour, however, working on the later period of the high Raj, the Victorian administrators of the Indian Civil Service could certainly be eccentric and fallible, but far from being oppressive exploiters they in fact "represented the British Empire at its best and most altruistic." It is difficult to imagine two books, on similar subjects, which have less common ground.

The Man Booker... international?

2007-04-22T11:58:00.000+05:30

Stuart Kelly grumbles about the 2007 Man Booker International Prize shortlist:

So I was eager to see the 2007 shortlist. When I did, bemused boredom swiftly turned to gnawing irritation. For the record, the novelists contending this year are Chinua Achebe, Margaret Atwood, John Banville, Peter Carey, Don DeLillo, Carlos Fuentes, Doris Lessing, Ian McEwan, Harry Mulisch, Alice Munro, Michael Ondaatje, Amos Oz, Philip Roth, Salman Rushdie and Michel Tournier. One thing is immediately conspicuous. You've probably heard of most of them.
There are only four non-English speaking authors. There is nobody from China, Japan, Russia, South America, Scandinavia, Eastern Europe, the Indian subcontinent or the Arabic world. Moreover, every author on the list who is eligible for the usual Man Booker has either won, or been shortlisted, for that award. "Diverse in nationality, language, themes and techniques", as the press release trumpets? Hardly.

In The Guardian, James English asks:

Surely it is a bad thing to have all these new prizes sprouting like weeds even while the established ones are themselves dividing and reproducing, generating offshoots and offspring that have us speaking of "baby Bookers" or of the Man Booker "family" of awards? Surely all this must be a symptom of literary soil rendered artistically arid by decades of global free-marketism and a superheating multinational machinery of hype?

Disappointingly, having asked the question, he answers "Nay".

Literary readings and other merde

2007-04-22T11:56:00.000+05:30

Mik Awake questions the 21st century hustle known as the literary reading:

In its producer-consumer format, in its faux-democratic approach to literary discussion, in which readers are encouraged to disagree only on which passage of a book was their favorite (Merde!), the literary reading is a perfect example of market culture’s damaging influence (Merde!) on our experience of art and perhaps, for many former or current students, an all-too-familiar echo of the teacher-student format (Merde! Merde! Merde!). In a situation where the Author equals producer, and reader equals consumer, disfavor can be seen as costly. But, without drunk French prodigies yelling out swear words, how do most people gauge public disfavor at a literary reading? The answer: silence.

How to sell your book

2007-04-22T11:41:00.000+05:30

Easy. Recruit your fridge and stovetop as marketing personnel.

(From MaudNewton): Miranda July uses the top of her fridge as a dry-erase board to promote her book, No One Here Belongs More Than You. I'm buying it. In yellow.

Kurt Vonnegut Jr, 1922-2007: Last line of book

2007-04-14T23:31:00.000+05:30

New York Times; SFGate; The Guardian; Globe and Mail.

From Slaughterhouse Five:

All this happened, more or less. The war parts, anyway, are pretty much true. One guy I knew really was shot in Dresden for taking a teapot that wasn't his. Another guy I knew really did threaten to have his personal enemies killed by hired gunmen after the war. And so on. I've changed all the names.
I really did go back to Dresden with Guggenheim money (God love it) in 1967. It looked a lot like Dayton, Ohio, more open spaces than Dayton has. There must be tons of human bone meal in the ground.

I went back there with an old war buddy, Bernard V. O'Hare, and we made friends with a cab driver, who took us to the slaughterhouse where we had been locked up at night as prisoners of war. His name was Gerhard Müller. He told us that he was a prisoner of the Americans for a while. We asked him how it was to live under Communism, and he said that it was terrible at first, because everybody had to work so hard, and because there wasn't much shelter or food or clothing. But things were much better now. He had a pleasant little apartment, and his daughter was getting an excellent education. His mother was incinerated in the Dresden fire-storm. So it goes.

From Breakfast of Champions:

Here was what Kilgore Trout cried out to me in my father's voice: "Make me young, make me young, make me young!"

From Player Piano:
''You think I'm insane?'' said Finnerty. Apparently he wanted more of a reaction than Paul had given him.

''You're still in touch. I guess that's the test.''

''Barely-- barely.''

''A psychiatrist could help. There's a good man in Albany.''

Finnerty shook his head. ''He'd pull me back into the center, and I want to stay as close on the edge as I can without going over. Out on the edge you see all kinds of things you can't see from the center.'' He nodded, ''Big, undreamed-of things -- the people on the edge see them first.''

Stealing books is right/ wrong?

2007-04-07T12:27:00.000+05:30

John Lanchester does a great piece on Google and copyright--yes, there is something new to say, and he says it:

So: 20% of all books are out of copyright, and Google can have them with everyone's blessing; 10% are in print, and the lines of argument are fairly clear. The other 70% of books are either in copyright but out of print or in a status about which nobody is certain - "orphan works", as they are known. (Nobody even knows how many books there are. The best guess seems to be about 32m.) It is over these titles that the big argument between Google and the publishers is taking place. Google wants them to be available online, together with links and places to buy the books. It seems to me this would mean that, in some crucial sense, Google was actually the publisher of the book - and this makes some publishers and writers nervous.
The crucial issue is one of trust. Everyone in the book world can see what has happened to music and is happening to film, and it worries them; the prospect of free digital copies of books is not automatically joyful. Ovenden says "I can't see how they'll sell more books by not being in Google" - which has a certain force. There is something horrifying about the idea that 70% of all the books ever published are in the limbo of being out of print. Anything that gives those works a new life and new readers, even if only a few a year, has to be welcome.

And The Splintered Mind discovers that ethicists steal more books than anyone else.

No more Aurelio Zen

2007-04-07T12:13:00.000+05:30

Michael Dibdin died in Seattle this week at the age of 60--The Telegraph has an intelligent tribute:

Dibdin deliberately tapped into British middle-class fantasies in the Aurelio Zen series. The appeal of the books lay partly in his decision to set each one in a different part of Italy (starting in the beautiful medieval city of Perugia), but also in the character of Zen himself: Dibdin invented him as an outsider, coming to Perugia as a stranger, much as Didbin himself had done when he arrived to teach English at the university there in the late 1970s.

For Shakti

2007-04-03T15:27:00.000+05:30

I met Shakti at a boring Delhi party over two years ago; she and Jeet had just moved back to Delhi from New York, and Shakti was doing what she did best--making friends. We chatted for a bit; she told me I needed sexier shoes (I still do, Shakti, you had the jump on me on that one), slipped a friendly hand into mine and asked when she could come over and meet my cats.

Over the next few months, Jeet and Shakti became part of our lives as though they'd always been there. Shakti joined Random House as an editor, and when we discussed books, I was struck by her openness to new ideas, her enthusiasm about authors. Samit Basu did a reading shortly after that; it coincided with his birthday. I was supposed to be in conversation with Samit; Shakti came up to me before the discussion started and told me she would put her hand up right at the end to ask a very special question, so could I make sure she was the last speaker? I said, of course.

Her question was simple. Would we all sing happy birthday to Samit, and cut the birthday cake she had thoughtfully smuggled in? We did; it's the only book launch I can remember that ended with the audience bellowing "Happy Birthday to You" at the author. It was a typical Shakti moment.

People gravitated to Shakti because she made us believe that anything was possible. She was curious about photography; she started to take her own pictures, and was planning to make a "wall of memories", a record of their first years in Delhi. At Jeet's poetry readings, Shakti was the one handling the digital video camera; she had an instinct for when to zoom in on Jeet's face, when to capture the audience's reactions.

She shifted from Random House to start up Bracket Books, and she sparked with ideas for her brand-new imprint. She had also started writing herself, and she had an astonishing voice, a very distinctive style. One of my friends calls it "handwriting", this business of a writer's signature, and says that it can't be taught--either you have your own "handwriting" or you don't. Shakti did.

At a Caferati evening where she, Jeet and I had been invited to discuss writing with Caferati's members, Shakti spoke with honesty about the challenges facing new authors, about the need for publishers to create what she called "welcoming spaces" for writers who were starting to find their own voices. She wanted to be one of those publishers; she wanted Bracket to reflect her own credo of openness and encouragement.

Jeet and Shakti had one of the most open houses in a city that takes hospitality seriously. Shakti was always at the heart of those evenings, the one who encouraged us to try to use a hula hoop, to do zany writing experiments, to read serious poetry in a seriously unserious manner. She believed in the importance of silliness, and in her company, I found myself letting go, letting my hair down, relaxing into the moment.

It seems so wrong that someone as vibrant as Shakti should be gone. It seems obscene to be writing what amounts to an obituary for someone who was so alive. But maybe it's one way to hold on to all the things that Shakti meant to us. In just two years, she brought so much joy into our lives; I believe she would have been an amazing writer, a kind and wise publisher. My thoughts are with Jeet, with their families.

Shakti Bhatt

2007-04-02T13:49:00.000+05:30

This is hard to write, but for all those who knew and loved her: Shakti Bhatt, writer, editor of the newly-established Bracket Books, and friend to more people than can be counted, died of a sudden and brief illness late on Saturday night.

She and her husband, the poet Jeet Thayil, moved back to Delhi from New York two years ago, and made a new life here by throwing open the doors of their home to all of us. Shakti was well-loved, and will be missed more than I can put into words right now. Our thoughts are with Jeet.

One of Shakti's friends sent me this poem, by Vikram Seth; I hope he won't mind if I put it up here today.

All you who sleep tonight
Far from the ones you love,
No hand to left or right
And emptiness above--

Know that you aren't alone
The whole world shares your tears,
Some for two nights, or for one,
And some for all their years.

Anya in Wonderland

2007-03-21T23:08:00.000+05:30

Found on the Net, this is from the 1923 Russian-language edition of Alice in Wonderland--this version was translated by Vladimir Nabokov, who was paid about 5 dollars for his work.

(Leigh Kimmel has a lengthy essay about Nabokov's translation here:
"Nabokov also sought to "translate" the situation of the novel into one familiar to the Russian child. Thus he renamed Alice "Anya", which is a common Russian girl's name, rather than simply transliterating it into the essentially foriegn Alisa. He also transformed other characters so that they would better fit into a Russian milleu. For instance, he made the French mouse, which in the English original had come to England with William the Conquorer, into a forgotten companion of Napoleon's invasion force who had been left in Russia by mistake.")

Victor Sonkin has a marvellous piece in The Moscow Times about how Alice got to Russia:

"Alice" first came out in Russian nearly 130 years ago, but back then, it seemed the book would not fare well here. The anonymously translated version of 1879 was met with confusion and bewilderment. "Tiring, most boring, most confused sick delusions of a little girl"; "absurd dreams may be recounted in a family circle for fun, but they are not published, illustrated and presented to the general public"; "one can hardly imagine anything less sensible and more absurd than this fairy tale; all mothers are urged to disregard this worthless fantasy" -- such was the critical consensus in Russia at the time.

It wasn't till the 1960s that Alice really found its audience, he writes.

Writing in Korea? Don't quit the day job

2007-03-21T22:51:00.000+05:30

From The Korea Times: "For writers, things could not be more grim. Ninety-four percent of the 200 respondents said they earn 500,000 won or less per month on average from activities related to their original job _ writing _ with 37 percent earning nothing."

Poor souls. They're members of a very distinguished club.

According to this 2005 story, children's authors in England earn peanuts too:

"J K Rowling's fellow children's authors..a third of whom earn less than the national minimum wage of £8,827 a year. And yesterday they published a survey of their own, claiming that some work for about 2p an hour."

SF writers don't do much better, according to this oft-cited survey on Tobias Buckell's blog.

And a new survey of UK writers is deeply discouraging:

The latest research reveals that the typical UK author earns 33% less than the national average wage. If this trend in earnings continues will creators be able to continue contributing 8% of GDP in the UK? If we value our creative industries so highly, can the nation afford to let this decline in authors' earnings continue?

W H Auden would have been less sympathetic. The Sunday Times reprinted his views on people who wanted to be writers:

"[When asked what they want to be in life]....an astonishing number reply “a writer”, and by writing they mean — dreadful word — “creative” writing. Even if they say: “I want to go into journalism”, this is only because they are under the illusion that in that profession they will be able to create. Even if their most genuine desire is really to make money, they will still make for some highly paid sub-literary pursuit like Advertising.
Among this host of would-be writers, the majority have no literary gift. This is not surprising in itself. A marked gift for anything is not very common.
What is surprising is that such a high percentage of those without a marked talent for any particular profession should think of writing as the solution."

Might have made the old curmudgeon happier if he knew they were suffering for their art.

No classics, thanks

2007-03-21T22:41:00.000+05:30

Several secondary schools in England have turned down the offer of free classics for their libraries, according to this story:

"The harsh reality of our secondary schools is that children just don't have the skills to tackle such complex ideas in the written format."

Much handwringing ensues, but spare a thought for the librarian who argued that kids today are much more likely to read if they're offered Eragon, Harry Potter, or Charlie Higson's Young Bond series.

Rushdie ka baap

2007-03-21T22:29:00.000+05:30

The Jabberwock has lunch with Amitava Kumar--lovely piece:

Does he think of the Rushdie of today as more a P3 celebrity than a serious writer? “I do, yes,” says Amitava, “and that’s the short answer. The long answer is: he’s a very important figure for us (contemporary Indian authors working in English). Baap hai woh. Aur baap ko gaali dena buri baat hai.” A meaningful pause, and I can anticipate what’s coming next. “Lekin chutiya baap hai. Baap agar roz daaru peeke ghar aayega toh aap usko kitna respect denge?”

Wainaina on Kapuscinski

2007-03-21T22:05:00.000+05:30

Binyavanga Wainaina:

I have tried, just once in my life, to be an Angry Black Man. I planned a picket in New York City against a man I love to hate -- Ryszard Kapuscinski. He was going to speak at a conference organised by American PEN. Nobody seemed to want to join me. There were better things to do in New York, like drinking -- I do not lie -- a hibiscus juice and chilli margarita. So I got drunk.

I like Wainaina's work a lot, but for all his sweeping generalisations about Africa (read the rest of Wainaina's piece, he makes a serious point), Kapuscinski remains one of my favourite writers. It's not just the "quality of the prose" thing, with writers who are controversial in this particular way--Kapuscinski, Naipaul.

It's that even when you disagree with the lens they focus on a country, a place, an idea--I have a lot of trouble with Naipaul's refusal to admit that his view of history in say, Vijayanagar, might not represent the truth of what happened, for instance-that disagreement forces you to think harder about what they're trying to get you to look at. I can see some of Wainaina's anguish--how could Kapuscinski, who wrote "Let us remember that fear of revenge is deeply rooted in the African mentality" be accepted as the Voice of Africa now, for instance. But the same man wrote with brutal honesty about being an outsider, a white man in Africa. And anguish can become obsession. Some of Wainaina's best writing has come from writing against the grain--against the vision that he accuses Kapuscinski of putting forward.

I like Wainaina's travel writing and his food writing, both in danger of being obscured by his classic essay, How To Write About Africa ("some tips: sunsets and starvation are good"). Some of his work is here: "Everything around me is a memory of water. The dry riverbeds, the millions of dried petrified trees, the camels taunting us all. The hot dry wind, the water carved gullies, the large flat depressions that become marshland when it rains."

Why to say no to literary conversations

2007-03-18T20:00:00.000+05:30

Invitations to dinner that promise "an evening of literary conversation" make me faintly uneasy, though I haven't been able to articulate why.

Now, thanks to a random Google search for "unusual literary lists", I know. In two words: Issei Sagawa.

I'd never heard of him before, but Sagawa's interest in literature emerged fairly early, when he was a literature student at Paris University. Attracted to one of his teachers, he wondered whether he could eat her. The opportunity never arose, but in 1981, he invited a student of avant garde literature, Renee Harteveldt, back to his house for an evening of literary conversation:

From Sagawa's confession:

"I am amazed. She's the most beautiful woman I've ever seen. Tall, blonde, with pure white skin, she astonishes me with her grace. I invited her to my home for a Japanese dinner. She accepts. After the meal I asked her to read my favorite German Expressionist poem. As she reads i can't keep my eyes off her. After she leaves I can still smell her body on the bed sheet where she sat reading the poem. I lick the chopsticks and dishes she used. I can taste her lips. My passion is so great. I want to eat her. If I do she will be mine forever. There is no escape from this desire.
I arrange for her to read the poem for me once more. I lie to her. I tell her I want to record the poem on tape for my Japanese teacher. She believes. I prepare everything. The cassette recorder for the poem, the rifle for the sacrifice."

He recorded her reading the poem; he shot her; then he ate several parts of her body, then roasted some meat off her hip, and ate it while listening to her recording of the German poem.

This happened in 1981; Sagawa is free, and has not, apparently, eaten anyone else since. All the same, if you want me over for an evening of literary conversation? I'll pass.

From Leaf Storm

2007-03-18T19:29:00.000+05:30

Just because it was his 80th birthday last week, this brief excerpt from Gabriel Garcia Marquez's Leaf Storm. It's a passage I think of every time someone speaks of India Shining/ Rising:

--Suddenly, as if a whirlwind had set down roots in the center of the town, the banana company arrived, pursued by the leaf storm. A whirling leaf storm had been stirred up, formed out of the human and material dregs of other towns, the chaff of a civil war that seemed ever more remote and unlikely. The whirlwind was implacable. It contaminated everything with its swirling crowd smell, the smell of skin secretion and hidden death. In less than a year it sowed over the town the rubble of many catastrophes that had come before it, scattering its mixed cargo of rubbish in the streets. And all of a sudden that rubbish, in time to the mad and unpredicted rhythm of the storm, was being sorted out, individualized, until what had been a narrow street with a river at one end and a corral for the dead at the other was changed into a different and more complex town, created out of the rubbish of other towns.

Mohsin Hamid's Reluctant Fundamentalist

2007-03-18T19:11:00.000+05:30

Salil Tripathi speaks to Pakistani novelist Mohsin Hamid, whose second novel, The Reluctant Fundamentalist, is just out:

From Tehelka:

When Hamid saw the planes crashing into the towers, he knew it would change the way we look at our world. “My mother, who loves America, was deeply upset. But I was struck when I saw images of children dancing; I heard people, and not just Muslims, say that the US had it coming. How do you divorce the symbolic appreciation of that act as a form of response, from the catastrophe it caused?”
The world as he understood it, and his own reality — of being a Pakistani in the West — altered profoundly. He returned to Pakistan when tensions rose along the Indian border after the attack on the Indian Parliament. He went back to the West, only to return once more, to pursue the novel, and, as he puts it, “the woman who became my wife”.

The Guardian has a brief review, calling the book "an elegant and sharp indictment of the clouds of suspicion that now shroud our world".

I'm catching up with this February piece by Hamid in The Independent on the test that qualified him for British citizenship:

"I am reading from pages 24 and 26 of the British Citizenship Test Study Guide. This, for those who are unfamiliar with the foundational text of our common culture, is "A comprehensive study guide containing official material, study advice and sample questions". So far, each of my colleagues has on average been able to answer only about one in three questions correctly. None, for example, could describe the intricately choreographed tribal ritual with which one year gives way to another in Wales.

Q: If you were visiting a Welsh home during the New Year, what tradition might be observed?

A: In Wales, on the stroke of midnight, the back door is opened to release the Old Year. It is then locked to keep the luck in, and at the last stroke, the front door opened to let in the New Year.

But unlike my colleagues, I, a 35-year-old, brown-skinned, Pakistani-born, US college- and law-school-educated, sometimes bearded, innately peripatetic, and rather obviously immigrated man can answer virtually all of the 175 sample questions correctly, because I spent much of the previous two days committing them to memory. I have, to borrow an expression from an illustrious group of navigators, The Knowledge."

America, Apocalypse Now

2007-03-18T19:05:00.000+05:30

Courtesy Prufrock's Page, this is Siddhartha Deb on recent "post-apocalyptic" America novels by Jim Crace and Cormac McCarthy:

Reversing America's manifest destiny of endless expansion, people are abandoning the country, making their way past ruined machines and highways, past roving bands of slavers, to take a ship to a better future. America has become the Old World, and Crace's protagonists Franklin Lopez and Margaret are sustained in their hard trek largely by visions of a land of plenty beyond the ocean.
It is a remarkably imaginative rendering, especially because Crace's novel joins a small but distinct body of works about an America that has fallen off the map of modernity.
In the 1980s, J G Ballard wrote Hello America, a characteristically quirky account of an abandoned continent that plays host to only a few rustic tribes with names such as Executives, Bureaucrats, Astronauts and Divorcees. Cormac McCarthy's The Road is a more recent attempt in this category, depicting a bleak, ravaged land where a father and son attempt to make their way past feral gangs and contamination, the stripped-down language of the novel demonstrating perfectly how this is a place shorn, finally, of all superfluity.

Out of curiosity, I Googled "post apocalyptic India novels". All I came up with was, on the first search page, a heartfelt reference on someone's blog to the menace of "f***ing maudlin Indian male drunks!" Not quite what I was looking for, but close, I suppose.

Apna Amitava

2007-03-18T18:40:00.000+05:30

Amitava Kumar's Home Products, a first novel from this critic, teacher and author of several non-fiction books, is out.

From his essay in The Hindu on writing a first novel:

When I began to get more time to write, maybe an hour or two each day, I'd start by reading a few pages of A House for Mr. Biswas. I wanted to be reminded again and again of the comedy that informs V.S. Naipaul's writing about failure. And every time I finished work, I'd be conscious only of the ways in which I had failed. There is very little doubt in my mind that one of the hardest things a serious writer must do is write with humour. It was easy to forget this demand because I was anxious to get the words on the page. I was always afraid that the book would run aground. I'd be stranded in the sand. The journal's pages are full of notes recording scenes and snatches of imagined dialogue. Much of it was never used. But reading those pages now, I can very easily recall the panic and dread that dogged me during that time.

And here's V S Naipaul on writing:

I thought when I began to write that I would do fiction alone. To be a writer of the imagination seemed to me the noblest thing. But after a few books I saw that my material - the matter in my head, the matter in the end given me by my background - would not support that ambition.
The ambition itself had been given me by what I knew of the great 19th-century novels of Europe, or what I thought I knew of them. I put it in that cautious way because, before I began to write, I actually hadn't read a great deal. I saw now - something I suppose I had always sensed but never worked out as an idea - that those novels had come out of societies more compartmented, more intellectually ordered and full of conviction than the one I found myself in. To pretend that I came out of a society as complete and ordered would in some ways have made writing easier.

Here's a brief excerpt from Home Products; Amitava read this at the Delhi launch:

"[Binod] began to read on his own when he got older. He read his mother's books. Till he was fifteen, the only book in English that he had read was The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway. It was a book that Ma had received as a wedding gift from her distant cousin Vijay, who later became a senior member of the Communist Party and prided himself on having read all the major works in modern English and American literature. Hemingway's story was simply told and the plot had been easy for Binod to understand.

Unaccountably, he had held the idea till then that all the books that were written in English had sex in them, and that was the only reason why it was just the grown-ups who read books in that language. But there was no sex in The Old Man and the Sea."

Though Binod and I don't have a background in common--he's a small town boy, I'm a big city person--this particular passage took me back to the wedding gifts from my marriage, 11 years ago. We had two receptions, one in Delhi, where the gifts ran to 'lemon sets', art and silver nut bowls; and one in Calcutta, where we were gifted hand-stitched tablecloths, handloom saris--and books.

It was years before I looked at the books, especially those in Bengali, and recognised the level of tact that had gone into their selection. My husband reads and speaks Bangla; I read and write fluently, but speak with some hesitation. The books that we were given sought to introduce me to what might well be an alien literary world, for all the gift-givers knew, but with tact and grace. The simple, more lucid works of obscure poets; short story collections by major writers, presumably easier for a beginner to read than novels; wonderful Bengali cookbooks, though much later I realised that I had received the ones written in less complex prose.
There were also two English books, gifted by the same person: Wuthering Heights and a Nancy Drew mystery. My husband and I puzzled over these for a long time: was this a subtle insult, Japanese-fashion, a delicate putdown of our intellectual pretensions? Was it an honest error? Years later, I learned that the gift-giver read chiefly in Bengali, was uncomfortable with English, but knew that both of us read "Ingrej" books. She had taken the time and trouble to visit an English bookstore and ask the sales person for two books: "One classic, and one fun read."
Those books are still on my shelf. They might not be appropriate reading, but I'm reluctant to let go of them.

And two moments from the Delhi reading:

Amitava spoke about his first job as a teacher at an American university. At the first meeting, someone suggested a course in 'Latino-Latina lit'; another professor, seeing his cue, asked why literature in a US university had to be so broad, what would happen to 'indigenous' American literature. Amitava: "In my village near Patna in Bihar, there's a mural of Mickey Mouse. He's selling a brand of toothpaste. Robert, I'll tell you what Latino-Latina lit is doing in a US university if you can tell me what Mickey Mouse is doing in my village." (Not an exact quote--I wasn't taking notes, so this is from memory.)

The second was when Jeet Thayil suggested, tongue-in-cheek, that Pankaj Mishra, Siddhartha Deb and Amitava Kumar were part of a new Cult of Authenticity:
"Amitava owns Patna. Siddhartha owns the North-East. And Pankaj owns a very large chunk of North India."

Garcia Marquez turns 80...

2007-03-18T18:30:00.000+05:30

...he celebrates by going for a walk with old pal Fidel Castro, while the rest of the world finally gets the story behind his feud with former friend Mario Vargas Llosa.

From The Independent story:

"..But Mario strayed. He fell in love with a beautiful Swedish air stewardess whom he met while travelling. He left his wife and moved to Stockholm.
Distraught, his wife Patricia went to see her husband's best friend, Gabriel. After discussing the matter with his wife, Mercedes, he advised Patricia to divorce Mario. And then he consoled her. No one else quite knows what form this consolation took..."

Vargas Llosa and Garcia Marquez met a few months later, which was when Llosa socked Gabo:

"As the cinema house-lights rose, Garcia Marquez saw Vargas Llosa a few rows behind. He moved to embrace his old friend, as is the Latin American way. But as he neared, he received a tremendous blow to the left eye.
"How you dare to want to embrace to me - after what you did to Patricia in Barcelona," the white-faced Peruvian said."

And not entirely unrelated: a primatologist speculates that humans gossip as a way of replacing the primate grooming function. In other words, if we weren't gossiping, we'd be picking lice out of each other's hair (an excellent definition of gossip, btw).

"Now Barabbas was a publisher"

2007-03-18T18:12:00.000+05:30

And so am I, which is one of the reasons why Kitabkhana's been so silent the last month.

By convention, publishers don't comment on other publishers' books/ authors, and there's excellent reason for that:

1. Write something nice, and you'll be accused of trying to steal the other guy's author.
2. Write something nasty, and the other guy's author will spit on the shiny new contract you're trying so hard to get him to sign.

So when I joined EastWest and Westland Books--an imprint associated with the Indian bookshop chain, Landmark--I went away to think about how to handle this. Right from the start, Kitabkhana had three parts to it: the book links, which allowed me, and I hope you, to keep track of book news; the book chat, which was the whole point of setting up a litblog; and the book gossip (admit it--that's why most of you read book blogs, yes)?

I don't think it would be fair to continue with the book gossip, at least the Indian author-industry book gossip--there's a conflict of interest here. But the book news and the book chat? Thought about this one for a while, and figured the best I can do is to try. Any suggestions about how to keep Kitabkhana running, and fun, while continuing to keep it honest, would be most welcome.

And if you're wondering about the post title, here's the story, from anecdotage.com:

"One day Lord Byron gave his publisher, John Murray, a handsomely bound Bible, its cover graced with a flattering inscription. Murray proudly displayed the book on a table where it would be seen by his many guests.
One day a visitor, admiring the book, noticed that at John 18:40, in the line 'Now Barabbas was a robber,' Byron had crossed out the word 'robber' and substituted... 'publisher'."

Tch. Authors.

List of lists

2007-03-10T04:59:00.000+05:30

Let's not mince words: literary lists are basically an obscenity. Literature is the realm of the ineffable and the unquantifiable; lists are the realm of menus and laundry and rotisserie baseball. There's something unseemly and promiscuous about all those letters and numbers jumbled together. Take it from me, a critic who has committed this particular sin many times over.

But what if—just for argument's sake—you got insanely rigorous about it. You went to all the big-name authors in the world—Franzen, Mailer, Wallace, Wolfe, Chabon, Lethem, King, 125 of them— and got each one to cough up a top-10 list of the greatest books of all time. We're talking ultimate-fighting-style here: fiction, non-fiction, poetry, modern, ancient, everything's fair game except eye-gouging and fish-hooking. Then you printed and collated all the lists, crunched the numbers together, and used them to create a definitive all-time Top Top 10 list.

So says Lev Grossman in Time, writing about The Top Ten: Writers Pick Their Favorite Books. He goes on to say

There are several lifetimes' worth of promising literary leads here—544 books in all. An 85-page appendix providing enlightened summaries of all the works mentioned is worth the price of admission all on its own.

He also gives away the punchline, so to speak, with "the all-time, ultimate Top Top 10 list, derived from the top 10 lists of 125 of the world's most celebrated writers combined." Here ya go:

1. Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy
2. Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert
3. War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy
4. Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
5. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
6. Hamlet by William Shakespeare
7. The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
8. In Search of Lost Time by Marcel Proust
9. The Stories of Anton Chekhov by Anton Chekhov
10. Middlemarch by George Eliot

Oh yes. J Peder Zane, the editor of the book, has a website up here, complete with blog and a page where you can go list your personal top ten. As of this post, the people's voice says that the top 10 books most mentioned from all the top 10 lists posted are:

Anna Karenina
The Great Gatsby
Lolita
Crime and Punishment
Ulysses
To Kill a Mockingbird
War and Peace
Moby Dick
All Things, All at Once
The Sound and the Fury
The Brothers Karamazov
Pride and Prejudice

(Yes, yes, 12 books. There was a three-way tie at number ten.)

The list of 544 books is here, by the way, all neatly linked up to Amazon "buy" links. That should pay the hosting bills!

And for the list of writers who contributed their lists, scroll down to the bottom of this page. (Chitra Divakaruni was the only Indian name I could find on the list before the wee type began to blur. No Sir V. No winner of the Booker of Bookers.)

Hutom in the 21st century

2007-01-28T12:49:00.000+05:30

I've just added Sarnath Banerjee's website to the sidebar, in the authors' section. He introduced the graphic novel to India when he came out with Corridor some years ago, and is back with The Barn Owl's Wondrous Capers, which blends the satirical sketches of the 19th century Bengali writer Kaliprassana Singha with the story of the Wandering Jew, brought up to date in 21st century Calcutta. Go read.

Jaipur Literature Festival: poets (2)

2007-01-28T11:57:00.000+05:30

One of the more pleasant surprises at the Jaipur festival was discovering the work of Tishani Doshi (previous post on Kitabkhana here). Tishani trained as a dancer with Chandralekha for several years, and perhaps this gives her a more liberating view of the body than most. Anita Roy drew her out on several subjects, and spoke at one point of women's dilemmas--motherhood, the messiness of the body. Tishani came back with a different viewpoint, borrowed freely from Chandralekha's philosophy of the human body as the microcosm of the universe, of discovering and unleashing its power.

Here's a bit from 'Homecoming', in her collection of poems, Countries of the Body:

"I forgot how Madras loves noise
Loves neighbours and pregnant women
And Gods and babies....

....How cars in reverse sing Jingle Bells
And scooters have larynxes of lorries.
How even colour can never be quiet."

Here's a link to 'Ode to Drowning'.

And here's the opening verse from 'On the Burning of An Unfamiliar Aunt':

"My family gathers around to mourn,
But mainly to whisper
How killing yourself
Amounts to confessing
Life somehow got too much for you."

Jaipur Literature Festival: poets (1)

2007-01-28T11:53:00.000+05:30

The convent school I attended in Delhi had firm views on How Poetry Should Be Read. We were supposed to stand "like Horatio at the bridge, girls!", elbows out and hands clasped together, and read "with nobility in your hearts". My only attempt at reading was a disaster.
"Look soulful."
(This was hard to do. I'd been allotted a particularly twee Sarojini Naidu verse--"Lightly o lightly we bear her along/ She sways like a flower in the wind of our song"--and was trying not to think of the parody: "Heavily o heavily we bear her along/ She should have skipped lunch, the silly fat Bong.")
"Think of the beauty of those immortal lines. Now look soulful."
(With much effort, I produce an expression redolent of terminal constipation.)
"No, no, look soulful! Think beautiful thoughts!" (In an aside to another teacher: "I fear this one is not spiritual enough, Rekha.")

What I liked most about the poetry reading session in tribute to Dom Moraes, Nissim Ezekiel and Arun Kolatkar at last week's Jaipur festival was that the three readers--Keki Daruwalla, Jane Bhandari and Jeet Thayil--had clearly not attended my convent school.
Keki pulled off the difficult feat of reading Nissim's over-anthologised Night of the Scorpion as though he was listening to the words for the first time. There are poems that are ruined because they've become too familiar--Wordsworth's Daffodils, Auden's Stop All The Clocks--and for my generation, it's hard to read 'Night of the Scorpion' without hearing a faint echo of the perfect, merciless parody: "I remember the night my mother bit the scorpion."
The hall was packed, and Antara Dev Sen, moderating the session, allowed the three poets on stage to remember their three absent colleagues in the way they preferred. Space Bar, Middle Stage and me enjoyed ourselves thoroughly, and I think poetry made two new converts out of two old sceptics, Jabberwock and India Uncut.
There were moments of sadness: Keki speaking of all the poets we've lost in a relatively short period--so very many of them, so many of them his friends as well as his peers--Arun, Dom, Nissim, also Agha Shahid Ali, A K Ramanujan, a handful of others.
There were small moments of revelation: Jane Bhandari talking about meeting Arun Kolatkar at the Wayside Inn in Kala Ghoda, Jeet Thayil giving us the stories behind Madhu Kapparath's photographs of the Bombay poets. Kolatkar's house was so tiny, he said, that guests had to be entertained on the equally tiny balcony or at his "office", the Wayside Inn, where he was to be found at the same table for years. Dom Moraes caught sitting at his typewriter at the exact moment that the genial, jesting raconteur melts away, revealing the forceful writer underneath.
The session closed with Jeet, Keki and Jane reading from their own poems. I particularly enjoyed Jeet's playful ghazal on Malayalam (excerpts reproduced here with the author's kind permission):

Ghazal: Jeet Thayil

Listen! Someone's saying a prayer in Malayalam.
He says there's no word for 'despair' in Malayalam.

Sometimes at daybreak you sing a Gujarati garba.
At night you open your hair in Malayalam....

...Visitors are welcome in The School of Lost Tongues.
Someone's endowed a high chair in Malayalam.

I greet you my ancestors, O scholars and linguists.
My father who recites Baudelaire in Malayalam.

Jeet, such drama with the scraps that you know.
Write a couplet, if you dare, in Malayalam.

Kapuscinski's last journey

2007-01-25T19:56:00.000+05:30

From The LA Weekly:

In The Soccer War, he recalls how, in Nigeria in 1966, he was "driving along a road where they say no white man can come back alive. I was driving to see if a white man could because I had to experience everything for myself." At the first roadblock, he was beaten and allowed to drive on after he had paid a toll. At the second road block, he was beaten again, doused in benzene but, after handing over the rest of his money, allowed to drive on rather than being set alight. Which meant that by the time he came to the third roadblock, he was penniless and highly inflammable.

From the II Journal:

The limitation of sources under the Communists had a very political effect on reading. People had just one book, and nothing else — no television or other diversions — so they just read the same book very carefully several times. Readership was high, and very attentive. It was people's only source of knowledge about the world. You have to understand that the tradition of Russian literature — and Russians are great readers — is also an eastern tradition of learning poetry and prose by heart. This is the most intimate relationship between literature and its readers: they treat the text as a part of themselves, as a possession. This art of reading, reading the text behind the text, is missing now.

An extract from Shadow of the Sun:

I asked John and Zado to take me to a hotel. They drove me to a shabby, two-storey building. The entrance was through a bar. John opened the door but could go no further. Inside, in the artificial coloured twilight and hot stagnant air of the small room, stood about 100 prostitutes: sweaty, exhausted, and so tightly pressed together, jammed in, that one could scarcely push one's hand in, let alone enter. It worked this way: if a client opened the door from the street, the pressure inside propelled one of the girls, as though from a catapult, straight into the arms of the surprised customer. Then another girl took her place near the exit.

From an acceptance speech for a prize:

It was enough to be familiar with European culture - enough just to be a European, born or naturalized - to feel oneself the master, lord of the house, the world's custodian. For this European needed no qualifications, no additional knowledge, no particular qualities of mind or character. I observed this still in the 1950s and 1960s in Africa and Asia. Some European, in his own country very average, even incompetent, and held in law regard, right away became a high commissioner, the chairman of a great concern, director of a hospital or school when he arrived in Malaysia or Malawi. The locals meekly listened to his injunctions, eager to absorb his remarks and theories. In the Belgian Congo the colonial authorities created a category, the so-called évolué, comprising those who had left the state of tribal "savageness" behind but did not yet deserve to be called Europeanized people. The évolué were something in between, on the way - Brussels attached the hope to them that thanks to effort, investment, patience and good will they would someday succeed in scaling the heights of Europeanness, and that meant the heights of humanity. In this excellent book Portrait du Colonisé précédé du Portrait du Colonizateur, Albert Memmi described the whole painful and humiliating process to which the évolué were subjected.
The 20th century was not only a century of totalitarian systems and wars. It was also the century of decolonization, of a great liberation. Three quarters of the residents of our planet freed themselves from colonial subjugation and - at least formally - became fully entitled citizens of the world. There never had been such an event in all history, and never will be again.

Ryszard Kapuscinski (1932-2007), one of the finest and most honest writers of our times, is done with his travels.

Jaipur Literature Festival-3

2007-01-24T11:41:00.000+05:30

Back in Delhi, I caught up with Ira Pande, who read from Diddi, her book about her mother, the writer Shivani, at the festival. "There is something very special about reading in a place like Jaipur," she told me. "In the small towns, I don't have to explain who Shivani was, they know her work, and the local reader comes to hear about writers like her."

It was "local" readers who turned out in huge numbers for authors like Bhanu Bharti and Sheen Kaaf Nizam. It's true that some of the people who packed the hall for Sheen Kaaf Nizam's reading were there to keep their seats in anticipation of Rushdie's reading, which was on next, but as one of the organisers told me, "He is one of our best poets. People have come from Jodhpur and Udaipur just to hear him." I met one of Nizam's fans, quietly exiting the hall instead of waiting for Rushdie's reading: "After this poetry," the gentleman said, "I have no appetite for prose." Publisher and author Urvashi Butalia was a little upset at the imbalance between the two groups--the "Englishwallas" and the "desi writers". While Bhanu Bharti, Seemantini Raghav (who read from the works of her father, the late Range Raghav) and Anupam Mishra attended sessions by a range of English-language authors, the courtesy was not always reciprocated. It was the "local reader" who came through for their authors, instead. Sitting at the back of the hall during Anupam Mishra's session, what struck me was the involvement of the audience. Most of them had read his book, Aaj Bhi Khare Hain Talab, and all of them had strong opinions on his work. I left just before the Q&A session--Hindi is not my first or even second language, and the questions were difficult for me to follow--but took away the sense that this was probably one of the most enriching, if under-reported, sessions at the festival.

Here's Ira Pande on the "little languages":

"I can dream in all three languages, English, Hindi and Pahari.... Kumaoni has different words for smells, just as the Eskimos are said to have 17 different words for snow. There's a word for the smell of an imperfectly cleaned bathroom. A word for the smell of an unaired room. I worry about the little languages. Hindi, Marathi, Bengali-these will always survive. But the little languages, like Kumaoni, that provided so much richness and texture to our lives, these are dying... "

Jaipur Literature Festival-2

2007-01-22T19:37:00.000+05:30

From Salman Rushdie's chat with Barkha Dutt: (this is reasonably accurate, but is not a complete transcript--taken from handwritten notes, so a few words and phrases are missing here and there.)

Rushdie on the travelling performers or bhaands of Kashmir:

In 1987, I went to Kashmir to make a documentary.... met the bhaands, went to their village and stayed with them.

We found that we would not tell the truth when the camera was running. They'd tell us all about an encounter with the Indian army, and then we'd start the camera:

"So tell us the story about what happened with Colonel so-and-so."
"No, no, no, nothing happened. Indian army, no problem. We love the Indian army."
"Cut". (Camera stops.)
"So tell us what happened with the Indian army?" (Long description of horrific encounter with the army follows. The film crew explains that they are now going to start the cameras.)
"So tell us the story about what happened with Colonel so-and-so."
"No, no, no, nothing to tell. Indian army, no problem."

Rushdie on the Indian army:
"The Indian army [in Kashmir] has behaved absolutely dreadfully."

In response to a question about whether he should have been so hard on the Indian army when officers were just following orders:

"Because 'I was only doing my job' was not an excuse in Nuremberg."

On Chhagan Bhujpal, former BJP leader, now a Congress minister, whom Rushdie interviewed for a documentary:

"He was, you know, an asshole."
"He spoke in very clearly racist, communalist and fascist language."
Bhujbal was anxious that some things should not appear in the official documentary.
"He said, 'racism is okay, because we are racist. Fascism is okay, because we are fascist.'" But Bhujbal didn't want to be photographed with his telephone.
"On his desk was a telephone in the shape of a green plastic frog, and when it rang it said 'Croak! Croak!' He didn't want pictures of the frog pressed to his face; and when you see a man talking to a green plastic frog, he is humbled. It's difficult to hate him."

Rushdie on meeting a fan in Egypt:

"So this man came up to me and said, Rushdie! Rushdie!
I said, yes, yes?
He said, I read That Book!
I said, oh.
He said, I like That Book! It's banned in Egypt! It's TOTALLY banned! But everyone has read it!" (Then Rushdie quotes from Mikhail Bulgakov: "Manuscripts don't burn.")

Rushdie on his parents, on Islam and on growing up among "extremely practising but incredibly open-minded" Muslims:

"My father was better at unbelieving. My mother was better at golf. In her old age, she did begin to get religion. It was kind of like arthritis..."

Rushdie was 13-and-a-half when he went to England and turned agnostic during a Latin lesson at Rugby--he was staring at the chapel, an ugly "great rocketship" to his eyes that "were trained by India". He thought, "What kind of god could live in a house as ugly as that?"
"By the end of the lesson, I had lost god. I went to the canteen and I ordered a ham sandwich. It wasn't very good ham, but I ate it. And there were no thunderbolts. And I thought, what kind of god is it who doesn't kill you for eating a ham sandwich?"

"My father wanted to rearrange the Koran--he believed the surahs were in the wrong order. He would discuss this with my grandfather, my father drinking whisky and my grandfather not.
He never did rewrite the Koran. Or The Trouble [a reference to the fatwa] would have arrived sooner."

On the burkha: "It's a one-woman tent! Maybe it's not such a good idea to put half the human race in a bag."

When Barkha suggests that perhaps he should worry about being so outspoken:
"What are they going to do, sentence me to death?"

Rushdie on being an author in the 21st century:

"If you look at books published in the 18th century...the title page of Robinson Crusoe has 'Robinson Crusoe: The Life and Strange Surprising Adventures of Robinson Crusoe of York, Mariner etc etc' (nb: the full title continues "...who lived Eight and Twenty Years, all alone in an uninhabited Island on the coast of America, near the Mouth of the Great River of Oroonoque; Having been cast on Shore by Shipwreck, wherein all the Men perished but himself. With An Account how he was at last as strangely deliver'd by Pirates. Written by Himself.")in very large type with Daniel Defoe's name in tiny letters. It's the same with Gulliver's Travels--there's 'Jonathan Swift' in small letters. Tristram Shandy: Sterne's name in small letters.
The books could go out and be famous, the authors could stay home and write.
There is now in our lives a public dimension that we can't escape.... But most of my life is not spent in public--it's spent with family and old friends...."

Rushdie on the difference between journalism and the novel:

"Let me read you this item from Bibliophile (Outlook's gossip column on books): 'Not everyone is delighted at the prospect of Salman Rushdie descending on Jaipur's litfest. The fatwa-ridden litstar is a security nightmare, and police plan to seal him up in an undisclosed hotel room until it's his turn to sing for his supper at the litfest.'"
Rushdie, who's been ambling around the festival grounds, signing autographs and chatting with fans for the last two days, gestures at the crowds sitting practically in his lap.
"As you see around you--security blanket! When writers write books, on the front page it says 'a novel'. They tell you it's made up. It's fiction."

Barkha, rising to the defence of journalists:
"How would you feel if you were completely ignored?"
Rushdie, unperturbed:
"Why don't you try it and see?"

Rushdie on Karachi:

"Well. I really don't like Karachi. It's a dump. It used to be a little dump, now it's a bloody big dump. My parents are buried there, but owing to the current crisis, I cannot visit their graves."

Rushdie on producing Edward Albee's Zoo Story for Pakistan television:

"This was when I wanted to be an actor. I suggested Zoo Story to them on the grounds that it would be very cheap--it was 50 minutes long, needed just two actors, and was performed on a bare stage with just a park bench.
Then we got to the scene where Jerry feeds six hamburgers to the dog, and the man from PTV said:
"No, no, no, the word 'pork'--pork is a four-letter word."

Rushdie argued that in the script it is very bad pork in the hamburgers, so bad that even the dog won't eat the burgers, so perhaps this should be seen as an anti-pork statement. The censor won't budge, though, so pork is replaced with a less offensive meat. Then they come to a scene where the word 'sex' is repeated thrice.

"No, no, no, the word sex--sex is a four-letter word."

Rushdie argues that the scene is crucial, that the word sex is necessary.
"No, no, no. The word 'sex' cannot be said on Pakistan television."
"But the scene?"
"No, no, scene is okay. But no sex."

So that's why Zoo Story is produced in Pakistan with the word 'sex' replaced serially by "desire", "lust" and "love".

Unfortunately for us, and fortunately for Rushdie, the tape was wiped.
"So nobody will ever see my Jerry," he says, looking greatly relieved.

Jaipur Literature Festival-I

2007-01-22T19:18:00.000+05:30

Things you should know about Diggi Palace (the festival venue):

1. It has an official palace cat. And an unofficial one that has a bell round its neck. It was apparently the unofficial one who dropped by Amit Chaudhuri's morning session, looked up at the moderator--Anita Roy--fell in love with her at first sight, and sprayed the back of her chair as a sign of its devotion while meowing ecstatically. Cat was deeply interested in what Amit had to say about Arun Kolatkar's Jejuri (more on that later), but left when he refused to sing for the audience.

2. Do not use the tiny, tiny loos near the deck chairs (do, however, use the deck chairs, they're fun), unless you're a woman who likes hassling the men by going into the loo marked MALE in fierce letters. Use the barn-sized loo outside the auditorium where you can see the dim figures of audience and speakers through the stained glass. It has beautiful acoustics: you can hear them, but they can't hear you.

3. The rooms are actually quite nice, despite the author who said in slightly despairing tones:

"My room is full of old-world charm."

We looked at him questioningly.

"I prefer new-world convenience."

4. The man who sells cigarettes, matches and other essentials of life (right opposite the teeny-tiny loo) is also a miniaturist--who in Jaipur isn't?--and will sell you cards and/ or paintings on a grain of rice if you ask nicely.

5. Speaking of old-world charm, Diggi Palace is awash in the stuff. The only place in Jaipur's we-have-a-haveli-and-a-niwas-on-every-street environs that can compete is the wonderfully named Tomato Palace--I have no idea what it looks like, but who wants to stay at the Rambagh or Loharu House when you can say, "Me? I'm at Tomato Palace. Come and we'll ketchup on the gossip."

6. But the Diggi Palace has an unbeatable ace up its sleeve: horses, and rather lovely ones at that, stabled close to the lawns. "Ooh, how romantic," said one lady, but that was before the wind shifted and perfumed our lunch with strong gusts of equine sweat.

Jaipurnama: off to the literature festival

2007-01-18T19:39:00.000+05:30

I'm off to Jaipur for the Literature Festival--19th to the 21st, list of events here--tomorrow morning, in the company of a blarney of bloggers, lucky old me. (Insert alternate suggestion for collective noun for bloggers here: a bloodletting of bloggers, a bloat of bloggers...)

The list of participants includes:

Salman Rushdie, Kiran Desai, Baby Halder, William Dalrymple, Suketu Mehta, Kiran Nagarkar, Amit Chaudhuri, Christopher Kremmer, John Zubrzycki, Bhanu Bharti, Seemantini, Anupam Mishra, Ashok Vajpeyi, Jerry Pinto, Ira Pande, Shashi Deshpande, Feryal Ali Gauhar, Sheen Kaaf Nizam, Ravi Singh, Marc Parent, David Godwin, Keki Daruwalla, Paro Anand, Atanu Roy, Dr. Hari Krishna Devsare, Jugal Mody, Jeet Thayil, Jane Bhandari.

Which means much enjoyment will be had by all. Especially since Jaipur's Lit Fest departs from the bizarre but persistent Indian belief that the thing to do when you get a bunch of writers together is to get them onto six-member panels discussing incredibly boring subjects. Instead, they believe that the thing to do with writers is to let them talk to the audience. Heresy, I know, but it should be fun.

'utch xword awards: fiction

2007-01-18T19:21:00.000+05:30

The Hutch Crossword shortlists for the 2007 awards have been announced.

English fiction:

Kunal Basu-Racists
Kiran Desai--The Inheritance of Loss
Vikram Chandra--Sacred Games
Rajorshi Chakraborti--Or The Day Seizes You
Manju Kapur--Home
Gautam Malkani--Londonstani
Kalpana Swaminathan-Bougainvillea House

"A global, not an American, century"

2007-01-04T16:25:00.000+05:30

From Pico Iyer's New Year's Day piece in the LA Times:

"The e-mails keep streaming in, here in my little apartment in Japan, from friends in California and places farther east. The world is unraveling daily, they say; we're going through a period of darkness unprecedented in our history. The war against terrorism is a war without end, in effect; the strikes of 9/11 have put us all on edge, even on trial, for life...
...The cries I hear in my friends' voices are those of conscience, and there's something stirring in their concern about America's war-mongering and injustices.
And yet, I feel like saying, America — though still the strongest power in the world — is by no means the largest or even the central one. One in every three people on our planet lives in China or India, and for those worthy souls, the new century is a time of possibilities unimagined before. There is corruption and oppression and pollution all over China; India is still a byword for suffering and poverty; and yet, for well over 2 billion of our neighbors in the global village, history is moving in a positive direction right now."

The post "spice and curry" generation

2007-01-04T16:21:00.000+05:30

Claudia Kramatschek writes about the new landscape of Indian writing in English. She mentions Rana Dasgupta, Altaf Tyrewala, Samit Basu, Sarnath Banerjee and several others:

Many Indian authors - especially younger ones - will tell you that they experience a certain pressure, strengthened by internationally active publishers, to act as cultural ambassadors. In other words, either to turn out "spice and curry" in the form of easily-digestible novels of the exotic variety, or else elucidations of "Indianness" as such.
But a younger generation of authors now appears to have emerged in the English-language literary sector whose common development manifests a kind of caesura. All are between 25 and 35 years of age – a fact while in and of itself represents a minor revolution in a country where the aura of the senior writer has always shaped the literary canon. All came of age in an India where access to the wider world was available via mouseclick, and all feel at home within the most divergent cultures – and they play with this intercultural network in their literary work as well...

Shades of the Brontes

2007-01-04T16:13:00.000+05:30

Justine Picardie visits the Bronte parsonage in the company of two psychics:

Before we go inside, Coral has already noticed something that interests her in the garden: two pine trees, one rather stunted, the other flourishing, on either side of what was once a gate that led from the parsonage to the churchyard. "Who planted those?" she says. "It's as if one signifies hope, and what might have been, and the other is of everything that was thwarted."
"Well, there's a story attached to them, possibly apocryphal," says Andrew. "They were supposed to have been planted by Charlotte and her husband, Arthur Bell Nicholls, just after they returned from their honeymoon." (They were married in 1854 on what Charlotte described as "that dim June morning"; her wedding veil and bonnet are still lovingly preserved in a glass case in the museum, touching relics of a short-lived marriage, for she died in March 1855, apparently in pregnancy, and her coffin was carried up the same church aisle that she had walked as a bride only nine months before.)

Who's Surrey now?

2007-01-04T16:09:00.000+05:30

Too bad none of the William McGonagalls I know live in Surrey, B.C., or they could've picked up $75 by doing this:

"As part of the exhibition "The Art of the Sari," the Surrey Art Gallery is currently looking for poems written by B.C. writers that are inspired by the form and grace of the sari...Poems must be original, submitted in both languages, and accompanied by the name and address of the poet. Fees will be payable only to the author."

Before prats, wallys and tossers

2007-01-04T16:02:00.000+05:30

The Oxford English Dictionary needs your help, to find out whether any of these words were in use earlier than the first reference they have to them.
So what were you before 1959, apparently the year the word "kinky" came into popular usage? Merely twisted? And does it matter, given that you wouldn't have known what to call a "marital aid" before 1976 or where to find a "pole dance" before 1992?

Wole Soyinka's tape? You're under arrest.

2006-12-26T00:46:00.000+05:30

Wole Soyinka couldn't attend his father's funeral for fear that he would be arrested:

I recorded a farewell message, including lines from Dylan Thomas' poem to his dying father, and I ensured it was played at my father's funeral. As I recalled in my latest memoirs, You Must Set Forth at Dawn, secret service agents swarmed the routes leading to the town, convinced that I would indeed attempt to sneak into the country. They converged on the church and, on hearing my voice over the loudspeakers, concluded that I had eluded their net and was delivering the funeral tribute in person.
Soon enough, they discovered the mechanical source of the voice and, once the service was over, swooped down on the church in an effort to seize the tape-but why? To reassure their bosses that I had not shown my face after all, that it was only disembodied voice that had evaded their roadblocks? Or to interrogate the tape and find out by what agency it had landed in the church?

Nadine Gordimer: No Cold Kitchen

2006-12-23T02:10:00.000+05:30

Nadine Gordimer has had much to survive this year--being assaulted by thieves at the age of 82 in her own home, grimacing reviews of her most recent novel, and now more reports about the rift between the Nobel Prize-winning author and her biographer, Ronald Suresh Roberts.

Rachel Donadio reports for the New York Times:

Among other things, Gordimer objected to the way he characterized an affair she had in the early ’50s , Roberts said. She also found distasteful Roberts’s account of the slow decline and death, in 2001, of her second husband, Reinhold Cassirer, a refugee from Nazi Germany and the nephew of the philosopher Ernst Cassirer.
More correspondence followed, in which Gordimer expressed objections both to Farrar, Straus and to Roberts, who insisted on his right to authorial autonomy....
In “No Cold Kitchen,” Roberts writes how Gordimer once introduced him to her Swedish publisher. “ ‘Ronald is my biographer,’ ” she says. “ ‘He is dangerous.’ She paused with the kind of grimace easily mistaken for a smile: ‘It’s a very strange relationship.’ ”

I'm not sure why the NYT did the story now; the first stories came out back in 2004:

"Ronald Suresh Roberts told the Guardian he was shaken by how a subject he revered turned on him after a seven-year collaboration intended to produce a sympathetic biography of her life and work.
The 80-year-old's objections led to publishers in the United States and Britain dumping the manuscript. "She is supposed to represent freedom of speech but she wanted complete control, tsar-like, which would have turned the manuscript into pious crap."

I suppose there are few relationships as close, and as twisted, as the one between a biographer and his subject. And it's probably the fact that they spent seven years in collaboration that makes some of this sound exactly like the messy end of a marriage juddering to a halt.

Word of the day: hikikomori

2006-12-23T01:44:00.000+05:30

I came across "hikikomori" in this short review by Mark Panek, and, being an ignoramus, was immediately fascinated:
Yasukata Tsutsui's "The Lion" thus turns from a light surrealist piece about being yourself into a kind of indictment, when we learn in the accompanying interview that he has quit writing altogether, withdrawn in protest like a hikikomori walled off from his oppressive, conformist world.

The New York Times did a report about a year ago:
Like Takeshi and Shuichi, Y.S. suffered from a problem known in Japan as hikikomori, which translates as "withdrawal" and refers to a person sequestered in his room for six months or longer with no social life beyond his home. (The word is a noun that describes both the problem and the person suffering from it and is also an adjective, like "alcoholic.")

Here's a link to a page about Francesco Jodice's film on the subject.

I'm fascinated by the hikikomori phenomenon, but somehow I can't see this working in the Indian context:

"Rajesh bete, come out and say hello to Aunty Pushpa."
"Oho, don't bother the boy, my daughter was telling he's gone hikikomori."
"Hikikomori-nikikomori, I don't know, but he must have some manners, no?"

Or:
Rajesh sits in his bedroom, brooding. He will spend the next six months in here, maybe longer, far, far away from the world.
"Rajesh bete, don't mind, na, but Sushma needs to use your bathroom, Chachaji is having his hair-oil-shampoo-bath for so long, poor thing is needing to go."
Rajesh says nothing; Sushma comes in, giggles, uses bathroom, comes out, giggles, leaves.
Rajesh sits in his bedroom, brooding. He will spend the next six months in here, maybe longer, far, far away from the world.
"Rajesh bete, sorry but the mistri is here to fix the pipes, leaking-sheaking, I told your father not to buy this flat, such shoddy construction but he always knows best. Accha and Renu Aunty is leaving Nikhil here--" enter pimply youth--"for the evening, he will sit and watch Naach Baliye, Nikhil bete, not to bother Rajesh, ok? Oh, and Chachaji says he might sleep here at night, because the baby is yelling only and keeping him awake, he can't do pranayama in morning and his bowels are not opening fully, one full jar of Isabgol he had but still--nothing!"
Rajesh sits in his bedroom, trying very hard to brood, but it just doesn't seem that easy any more.

Galle-d: Sri Lanka's literary festival

2006-12-23T01:06:00.000+05:30

The Galle Literary Festival sounds like yet another great pitstop on the writers' version of Formula One--you go round and round endlessly, at very high speeds, before you crash and burn--known as the global litfest calendar. The list of participating authors has several Sri Lankan writers--including Romesh Gunesekera--and many of the usual suspects, from William Dalrymple to Suketu Mehta and Kiran Desai. So what's wrong with this picture?

A lot, according to The Asia Sentinel: "Is it appropriate for a registered charity dedicated to Sri Lanka’s December 2004 tsunami relief to sponsor a foreign literary festival in the middle of what to all intents and purposes is an ethnic and civil war? Of course, says Geoffrey Dobbs, a colorful Anglo-Australian hotelier who founded both the upcoming Galle Literary Festival and the charity Adopt Sri Lanka. He says he sees no conflict whatsoever."

The financial accusations are disturbing, but what's really annoying is the pompous, sneering tone of the Asia Sentinel report.

"Dobbs’ festival aims at marrying the yuppie fervor for exotic foods with a neo-colonial langor and the presumed intellectual glamour of being in close quarters with famous wordsmiths."

Then the reporter quotes from Nazreen Sansoni's blog--Nazreen is a festival organiser and runs a bookshop at Colombo's barefoot:

A posting on a festival-related blog asked “What are they discussing? The “one Sri Lanka” or some such bullshit? Tell that to the people of the Northeast especially the Vanni, Jaffna, and Vaharai, you all party while people die.” Writer

Not that he provides a link to, or quotes, the flame war that follows:

Of all things a festival of this sort should surely be free of the ethnic merry go round. It gets on my nerves when everyone gets on the bandwagon and insists they be represented come what may. Chill out! If you wish to attend the festival come by all means. If you have issues stay away and let the rest of us readers and book lovers in war torn, crazed, unsafe, racist, chauvinist Sri Lanka attend this literary festival that I for one am delighted that someone took the initiative and decided to organise. Ethnichybrid.

So why have a festival in the middle of a war-torn country when, as a writer, you could just... I don't know, shun Sri Lanka in solidarity with its conflict-affected citizens or something?

Nazreen puts it best in one of her responses on the blog:

Please come up with a plan on how to solve this terrible, ego-driven, politically motivated (war) last I heard most people in all rural areas of the country just want the freedom to get on with their lives.
So you know what? whilst i can, I am getting on with mine. In the hope that if some good comes out it, (whether it’s bringing up a child, a lit fest or whatever) then we may have won half the battle.

Ah well. The Babu wishes he could be in Galle this January, but he is chuffed to see how the Sri Lanka litfest is every bit as normal as every other lit fest in the world. Someone's bitching about flying writers down business class, someone's cribbing about who's been left off the authors' list, someone kvetches that there are too many popular authors as opposed to writer-writers on the list (if it's the opposite, someone always complains that the fest is way too literary for the masses), and the ones who can't go suspect darkly that everyone else will enjoy the party without them. Unfortunately, the only other story I can find about the festival in the Lankan papers online is pretty much a regurgitated press release. The funds bit is murky, but then again, the Asia Sentinel only quotes anonymous donors, so it would be nice to know what's really going on.

Kashmir, Lahore, Sudan: bookshops

2006-12-21T12:51:00.001+05:30

Yoginder Sikand trawls Lahore's bookshops and comes back disappointed:

Lahore's famed Urdu Bazaar, located in a chaotic, run-down part of the old town, consists of several narrow lanes lined with filth-clogged drains.
I spent two days in the bazaar and visited each of the dozens of small bookshops it boasts of. On the look-out for literature on the lived social realities in Pakistan, I was sorely disappointed.

In a feel-good story that's been doing the rounds on the Net, Sheikh Mushtaq reports that bookshops have been reopening in Kashmir:

Shops selling Islamic tracts or tuition books stayed open amid the violence that has killed tens of thousands of people, but Asian or Western classics and new blockbusters were scarce.
Now, the works of Shakespeare, Charles Dickens and Thomas Hardy jostle for space with Salman Rushdie and Dan Brown bestsellers in Srinagar's few bookshops.

But Daniel Lepeska has a different take, in his story on Kashmir's neglected libraries:

In the age of bottomless broadband Internet and 2000-channel satellite television reading may be on the wane across the globe, but in Kashmir the problem is especially acute, and the stakes particularly high. From Mughals to Dogras and so on, Kashmiris have for centuries been under one or another oppressive yoke; an unwillingness to read could fate them to remain there.
"Without a library there's no university, there's no thought, there's no progress," Agha added. "Libraries and universities, these things are on the frontier of thought, where you can move forward and ask inconvenient questions; this is an absolutely dead society, afraid of asking questions."

There are places in the world where running a bookshop is much stranger than in Lahore or Srinagar, though, as this 2004 Economist story on Sudan's only bookshop testifies:

IF JEROME K. JEROME were alive today, he would be proud. Over a century after he wrote it, “Three Men in a Boat”, his quintessentially English comic novel about accident-prone Victorian gentlemen paddling down the River Thames, is a bestseller in southern Sudan.
This may seem unlikely. Southern Sudan is the scene of Africa's longest-burning civil war. Its people have for decades lived in fear of death or enslavement at the hands of mounted militiamen. How could they relate to a comedy about chaps in red-and-orange blazers sculling to Hampton Court and getting lost in the hedge maze there?

Birkerts on Sacred Games

2006-12-21T12:29:00.000+05:30

"I opened to the inside cover, where I saw printed in giant caps "AN EPIC NOVEL OF CRIME, FAITH, FAMILY, AND DESTINY," a tag so basic as to be invisible. But then, just below, in slightly smaller caps: "$300,000 MARKETING CAMPAIGN."

Sven Birkerts on receiving the advance copy of Vikram Chandra's Sacred Games. Birkerts is, like most reviewers, cynical about the publishing game: Sacred Games has, in order, the "India factor" going for it, the "exotic in the familiar genre" factor going for it, and Chandra's "moody-eyed, brooding" looks going for it.
Then he gets down to reading the book, and this is the part I love:

[Sacred Games is] working. Page after page it plucks me from the here and now, from the world governed by marketing mentalities, ruled by tasks and anxieties. I really am for long stretches in some phantasmagoric, confusing, reeking, corrupt, overheated, overpopulated elsewhere, a Mumbai of the mind, with characters who surprise me with their look and sound, their twists of behavior. How strange. It's as if I've needed to go through this peculiar re-immersion to get to my turnaround, to remember -- again -- why I got into this game in the first place. It was out of love.
After all these years I see that love is still the motive force. The honest work of art trumps the cynic, and elevates the critic, every time.

Needed that little reminder.

"My Father's Suitcase"

2006-12-21T12:25:00.000+05:30

I have rarely been as moved by a piece of writing as I was by Orhan Pamuk's Nobel lecture:

As you know, the question we writers are asked most often, the favourite question, is; why do you write? I write because I have an innate need to write! I write because I can't do normal work like other people. I write because I want to read books like the ones I write. I write because I am angry at all of you, angry at everyone. I write because I love sitting in a room all day writing. I write because I can only partake in real life by changing it. I write because I want others, all of us, the whole world, to know what sort of life we lived, and continue to live, in Istanbul, in Turkey. I write because I love the smell of paper, pen, and ink. I write because I believe in literature, in the art of the novel, more than I believe in anything else. I write because it is a habit, a passion. I write because I am afraid of being forgotten. I write because I like the glory and interest that writing brings. I write to be alone. Perhaps I write because I hope to understand why I am so very, very angry at all of you, so very, very angry at everyone. I write because I like to be read. I write because once I have begun a novel, an essay, a page, I want to finish it. I write because everyone expects me to write. I write because I have a childish belief in the immortality of libraries, and in the way my books sit on the shelf. I write because it is exciting to turn all of life's beauties and riches into words. I write not to tell a story, but to compose a story. I write because I wish to escape from the foreboding that there is a place I must go but – just as in a dream – I can't quite get there. I write because I have never managed to be happy. I write to be happy.

Noblogging excuse # 267...

2006-12-20T21:10:00.000+05:30

...you think "the dog ate my homework" was lame? Try "my cat slashed my eyelid into two matching crescents".
Mara, our 10-year-old diabetic cat, decided for reasons known only to a cat balanced on the fine edge between divine madness and creeping senile dementia that four am would be a very good time to climb to the top of a cupboard. The problem is that she's not as young or limber as she used to be, and she can't always find her way down. Her solution is to mew piteously and wait for one of us to rescue her--which we would have done if it hadn't been 4 am, and even in our insomniac household, definitely Sandman time.
So the first I knew of her cupboard-scaling experiment was when a pile of books on the headboard of the bed cascaded onto me, followed shortly by a panicked cat who had decided to cushion the great leap into the unknown by using my face as a landing pad.
"Can you open your eyes?" the partner said.
I did.
"Good, good, now close them."
I did.
Long silence.
"Cool," he said, "I can see your eyeball through the eyelid."

The stitches came out today, and instead of the fetching, dashing, slightly sinister scar I'd been hoping for, what I have is a line that looks, as a cruel (and hey, now ex-) friend said, like a second eyebrow. Or really smudgy mascara. The weird bit is it's only now that I have the use of my right eyelid back that I realise how odd reading had been over the last week. The stitches worked like a miniature facelift, tightening the eye so that everything on the right side of the page/ computer screen came into exceptionally sharp focus--except for a small and irritating patch of "fog" that seemed to travel down the screen/ page and usually blurred the exact bits I was trying to read. I did discover one kind of writing that didn't strain the eyes or add to the Babu Botox look--terse, laconic, three-words-to-a-line poems of the kind that cling to the left margin of the page.

The nice thing about having the eyelid sliced up, sashimi-style, is that the surgeon stitched it up with peacock-blue catgut. (I hope it wasn't REAL catgut, unless of course it was sourced from Mara-the-marauding-feline's intestines.) So I managed to gross friends out by not mentioning the eyelid thing at all until they stared hard and said, "Is that blue mascara running down your eyelid, or is that a mehendi tattoo gone wrong?" That was my cue to invite them to take a closer look and watch as the full horror of the situation dawned on them (people are really, really squeamish about eyelids).

"That doesn't look like mascara exactly."
"It isn't mascara."
"Oh? What are those funny pouchy bits in between? They look a bit like skin--EEK! AARGH! That is SO GROSS!"

That's usually when I'd tell them about how one of the doctors who saw the injury said, "Hmmm. If your cat had gone half a centimetre further, your eyelid would have been opening and shutting--you know, like a door on a hinge."

Anyway. Blogging will be back tomorrow; until then, I'm reading a present from a friend with a peculiar sense of humour--Jonathan Coe's House of Sleep. Enjoy this excerpt, about an eyelid fetishist. Or if you're a classicist, refresh your memory of the eyelid-clamping scene in A Clockwork Orange. Not squeamish yet? Check out this fine collection of eyelid speculae.

Events: If you're in Delhi this week...

2006-12-11T14:09:00.000+05:30

Tuesday 12 December:
4 PM: Gulmohar Hall, India Habitat Centre, Lodhi Road

Penguin India hosts a discussion on the book 13 Dec: A Reader--The Strange Case of The Attack on Indian Parliament.

Speakers: Arundhati Roy, Indira Jaising, Nandita Haksar, Nirmalangshu Mukherji, Praful Bidwai, Shuddhabrata Sengupta.

"Most people, or let’s say many people, when they encounter real facts and a logical argument, do begin to ask the right questions. Public unease continues to grow. A group of citizens have come together as a committee (chaired by Nirmala Deshpande) to publicly demand a Parliamentary enquiry into the episode....Every day new articles appear in the papers, on the net. At least half a dozen web sites are following the developments closely. They raise questions about how Mohammad Afzal, who never had proper legal representation, can be sentenced to death, without having had an opportunity to be heard, without a fair trial. They raise questions about fabricated evidence, procedural flaws and the outright lies that were presented in court and published in newspapers. They show how there is hardly a single piece of evidence that stands up to scrutiny."

Tuesday 12 December
7 PM, Casuarina, India Habitat Centre, Lodhi Road, Delhi

Zubaan presents "Words of Women: First Show".
Readings by Madhulika Liddle, Mitali Saran and Monica Mody; (I'll be moderating or immoderating, as the case may be.)
"The intention is to provide a platform to hear the voices, and read the words of the next generation of talented women writers. We will be showcasing three young women - poets, fiction and non-fiction writers - who are at the beginning of their writing careers."
Madhulika Liddle introduces a detective at the Mughal court; Mitali Saran explores the disappearance of a young woman in Srinagar; and Monica Mody's poems dismantle taboos, celebrate sexuality and demand an end to silence.

Friday, Saturday, Sunday: December 15, 16 and 17

6:30 pm onwards, India International Centre Annexe, lawns, (IIC, Lodhi Road, Delhi)

Almost Island is a web journal of literature, due to appear soon. It is
edited by Sharmistha Mohanty, with Vivek Narayanan as contributing
editor. To celebrate its founding, Almost Island would like to invite
you to a series of readings:

Dec. 15:
Allan Sealy
Mariko Nagai
K. Satchidanandan

Dec. 16:
Sharmistha Mohanty
Vivek Narayanan
Vinod Kumar Shukla

Dec. 17:
Arvind Krishna Mehrotra
George Szirtes
Followed by
A performance of Dastangoi, a lost art of storytelling, by Mahmood
Farooqui and Danish Husain

Arvind Krishna Mehrotra is the author of four collections of poetry, The
Transfiguring Places, Distance in Statute Miles, Middle Earth, and Nine
Enclosures. He has also translated poetry from the Pali, The Absent
Traveller: Prakrit Love Poetry. He has edited The Oxford India Anthology
of Modern Indian Poets, and the Oxford History of Indian Writing in
English. He teaches English literature at the University of Allahabad.

Sharmistha Mohanty is the author of two novels, Book One, and the
recently published New Life. Her translations of Tagore's fiction,
Broken Nest and Other Stories are due out early next year. She has also
worked in the serious cinema and has scripted the feature film Nazar
directed by Mani Kaul. She lives in Bombay.

Vivek Narayanan has lived in Africa, the United States and India. His
poems and stories have appeared in journals and anthologies in India,
South Africa, and the United States. His book of poems, Universal Beach,
has been recently released. He lives in New Delhi and is part of Sarai.

Mariko Nagai is a poet and a fiction writer. She lives in Tokyo, but has
spent much of her life in Europe and the USA. She has twice won the
Pushcart Prize, for poetry and fiction. Her book of poems Histories of
Bodies is due out soon in the United States. She is also a translator
from the Japanese into English. She heads the Creative Writing Program
at the Tokyo campus of Temple University.

Allan Sealy is the author of The Trotter-Nama, Everest Hotel, The
Brainfever Bird, and Red. He has received the Commonwealth Prize and the
Sahitya Akademi Award. He lives in Dehra Dun.

Vinod Kumar Shukla is a poet and fiction writer. He has over twenty
books of poetry and prose. Shukla is the recipient of the Shikar Samman
and the Sahitya Akademi Award. His work has been translated into several
languages He lives in Raipur.

K. Satchidandan has nineteen collections of poetry, including Five Suns,
When the Poet Writes, Imperfections and other New Poems. He has also
translated the work of major Euorpean and Latin American writers into
his native Malayalam. He has received the Kerala Sahitya Akademi Award
four times. He has recently retired as head of the Sahitya Akademi. He
lives in New Delhi.

George Szirtes was born in Hungary but has spent most of his life in
England. He has over fifteen collections of poetry, the more recent of
which are An English Apocapypse, and Reel, for which he was awarded the
T.S. Eliot Prize. Szirtes is also a translator from the Hungarian into
English, and has translated the work of such major writers as Laszlo
Krasznahorkai, and Sandor Marai. He lives in Norwich.

Thursday, December 14

6:30 pm, Gulmohar Hall, India Habitat Centre, Lodhi Road

Book discussion: Scarred: Experiments with Violence in Gujarat, by Dionne Bunsha

From Dionne's blog: Ameena’s on the run again. During Gujarat’s communal violence in March 2002, she had to escape when her village, Pandharvada, was attacked. Today, she’s running from the law. The police have filed a case against her and several refugees because they dug up a mass grave in Lunawada with the remains of their relatives.

Speakers: Sheikh Naushad Rasool and Hafizabanu Naushad, from Pavagad village, Gujarat
Tanvir Jafri, son of late Ahsan Jafri, former Member of Parliament
Rohit Prajapati, peace activist, Paryavaran Sukarsha Samiti, Vadodara

Friday, December 15

7 pm British Council, Kasturba Gandhi Marg, New Delhi
For details: British Council website

Spoken Word Series: Malika Booker and Taru Luederitz-Dalmia
Poets have always read from their work so the concept of performance poetry is in many respects not new, particularly in India where court poets over the centuries have entertained their masters with rhythmic ghazals and finely turned couplets. In the grand tradition of epic and not-so-epic poetry, the poets of today are dusting off their vocal chords to bring to audiences what they like to call open mic, poetry slam, performance poetry or, very simply, the spoken word travelling across the world from town to town, reading their work and getting themselves heard.

Malika Booker: Writing is the best way to engage the imagination, to create magic, change the world. I write because my mother tells me I am the first generation of women to be able to tell our stories and because I know there are women in the world who cannot speak. I write to make sense of life, to make the ordinary extraordinary. I write to tell stories, our stories. But most importantly, I write because I cannot do anything else. If I am not writing, then I am not breathing.

Taru Luederitz-Dalmia: Rapper and spoken word artist based in New Delhi; his work draws from the subversive politics of hip-hop culture and Reggae Sound system culture.

A Lille bit of this, a Lille bit of that

2006-12-10T22:20:00.000+05:30

Should've posted this ages ago, but was very busy goofing off. Ruchir Joshi and Indrajit Hazra went to Lille for a writer's festival that's part of a larger Oriental scene-type thing, and all they brought back were hangovers and these memories:

Indrajit Hazra:

Rather incredibly for a northern-European town replete with 18th century classical-baroque architecture, there are giant elephants paving either side of the road. It turns out that before my arrival to Lille, Bollywood art director (of Lage Raho Munnabhai fame) Nitin Desai has already been here. Instead of a French version of Unter der Linden, Berlin’s famous boulevard with lime trees on either side, Lille’s Rue Faidherbe is lined with bedecked Nitin Desai elephants — not to mention giant deepa stambha. I guess if it’s Lille 2006, it has to be Deepawali. So much for running away from the bright lights of New Delhi...And I, mon ami, was supposed to be one delightful representative of India’s cultural delights.
My mind, of course, was less focused on answering difficult questions — “Is there punk rock in India?”, “You have a negative character called Ajit Chaudhuri in your novel. Is that a camouflaged depiction of your fellow Bengali writer Amit Chaudhuri?”, “Are you a misogynist?” — and more inclined towards discovering Lille’s nooks and corners.

Ruchir Joshi:

"...Could there be a similar reason why, all too often, Westerners, especially the French, have feted and felicitated some our most mediocre painters, film-makers and writers? Could it be that the different segments of the famed French intelligentsia are actually all too aware of how pedestrian some of the ‘names’ are that they have invited over from India? Could it be that it isn’t, as we suspected previously, plain old laziness and ignorance but shrewd insight that has led to some quite bizarre celebrations of so-called ‘maitres Indiennes’ at the expense of genuine talents? Where the exotic poseur-painter, the pseudo-cineaste, and the loud charlatan of a writer have all served to bolster some fraying Gallic sense of cultural self-esteem?
The fact that some would immediately include this writer in their list of usual suspects didn’t stop the thought from accompanying me all the way from Lille in northern France to Marseilles and then Arles in the stupendously lovely south."

Back to Jejuri

2006-12-10T21:21:00.000+05:30

"Enjoy, and please throw away that organic mass of germs you've been calling poetry," the note said. Enclosed was a shiny new copy of Arun Kolatkar's Jejuri, which was reissued this year by the NYRB.

For years, like most of my generation, I'd been reading Kolatkar's classic poem-cycle in samizdat form--some of us had copies that had been xeroxed so often that Kolatkar's words assumed ghostly form on the page, some had painstakingly typed (yes, typed, as in on a manual typewriter) copies of the book with corrections made in violet ink. It felt very strange to be finally reading Jejuri in proper book form, to see 'A Scratch' laid out perfectly, without smudges, on a page that didn't look moth-eaten:

what is god
and what is stone
the dividing line
if it exists
is very thin
at jejuri
and every other stone
is god or his cousin

there is no crop
other than god
and god is harvested here
around the year
and round the clock
out of the bad earth
and the hard rock

that giant hunk of rock
the size of a bedroom
is khandoba's wife turned to stone
the crack that runs right across
is the scar from his broadsword
he struck her down with
once in a fit of rage

scratch a rock
and a legend springs

I like Amit Chaudhuri's clarity in his introduction to Jejuri:

When I reread Jejuri now, I realise how important the modern metropolis before globalisation - with its secret openings and avenues, its pockets of daydreaming, idling, and loitering, its loucheness - is fundamental to Kolatkar as a way of seeing. I am reminded that, although it's about a journey to a remote (for many) pilgrimage town in Maharashtra, it's less about the transformations of the journey than about a man who never left the city, or a cosmopolitan, modernist idea of the metropolis; that his journey, and his sense of travelling and of wonder, brought him back to where he was - and where he was is metropolitan, shabby, and dislocating.

(The Calcutta Telegraph published the complete introduction, so here's Part I, II, III, IV and if anyone can find a link to Part V, please let me know!)

Earlier, in 2005, Amit had written about the unease that Jejuri often evokes:

Kolatkar died last year, and his death means he's safely passed into the minor canonical status that India reserves for a handful of dead poets who wrote in English. But the present consensus about him shouldn't obscure the fact that his estranging eye in his English work has been problematic to Indian readers.

And here's Bruce King's essay on three Indian poets--Moraes, Ezekiel and Kolatkar.

Even so, I'm not sure I want to trash my "copy" of Jejuri, with each set of stains and perforations on every page marking a different set of memories. But when I find the manila envelope that Jejuri has lived in, missing pages and all, for so many years, it contains only fragments--my cats have been using Kolatkar's poems as a convenient scratching post. I can move on and enjoy my brand-new copy with no regrets; there's nothing to hold on from the past.

Debut novelist beats Pynchon, Haddon, Welsh, Self

2006-12-03T06:51:00.000+05:30

Iain Hollingshead took away the Literary Review's Bad Sex in Fiction award, says the Guardian.

Judges were moved by Hollingshead's evocation of "a commotion of grunts and squeaks, flashing unconnected images and explosions of a million little particles." His description of "bulging trousers" sealed the win, the judges said.

"Because Hollingshead is a first-time writer, we wished to discourage him from further attempts," the judges said in a statement. "Heavyweights like Thomas Pynchon and Will Self are beyond help at this point."

Extracts from the shortlist here.

Since the Babu is still engrossed with Yak poetry, we thought we'd sidle in and leave you a link to a subject we know is of great import to his Babuness.

Babu in Bhutan

2006-11-11T00:40:00.000+05:30

The Babu takes (yet another) blogging break for the next seven days. He hopes to meet apparently elusive Bhutanese poets, but will content himself with random yak poetry, if all else fails. But he knows you won't miss him, not when there's the Sidebar People to visit, especially these guys.

The Iron Purdah

2006-11-09T13:53:00.000+05:30

Asra Q Nomani, in Slate:

"The image-makers of the West...seem to have a veil fetish. They are doing the exact opposite of what the European politicians suggest: They're imposing the veil on women... Book publishers seem to be the worst offenders. And, ironically, veiled women are often used to promote books by and about women who reject the niqab. Arab-American writer Susan Muaddi Darraj protested when Praeger Publishers slapped the image of menacing eyes framed by a black veil (with minarets curiously rising out of the veil's blackness) on the cover of Scheherazade's Legacy, an anthology she edited of writings by Arab and Arab-American women, most of whom are Christian. "I was not happy with it—it seemed almost sarcastic given the content and the scope of the book itself," says Darraj. "However, the publisher seemed to show no interest in my perspective. ... The cover was 'finished,' from their point of view."

Naipaul, the usual

2006-11-09T13:36:00.000+05:30

Somewhere in this collection of provocative quotes, I suspect Sir Vidia was making a fairly complex argument. Not that you can tell from the story.

"There is no tradition of reading in India. There is no tradition of contemporary literature."

"Indians have no regard for museums...The idea of a museum is a Western idea. It's not an Indian idea. The idea is that these things are old, they are finished."

"Caste is a great internal series of friendly societies and in bad times it kept the country going. But people don't understand this. It has to be rethought and a new way of looking at it."

I like Lady Nadira's answer to a question about whether the Naipauls could live in India: ""Yes, quite happily, if we didn't have a cat. Our cat is an English cat. It is hard for it to live in India, but we can." Forget Sir Vidia's views on caste and Indian literature--when it comes to the issues that really count, the Naipauls have their priorities absolutely right.

And from the NYT, a brief excerpt from John Fowles' Journals on how Naipaul's In a Free State won the Booker Prize in 1971:

"It was all a chess game, really. [Philip] Toynbee and I had stopped [Saul] Bellow’s first choice, ‘Goshawk Squadron.’ Bellow and I had stopped Toynbee’s first choice, the Taylor. Bellow and Toynbee had principally stopped my first choice, the Richler. After that, Toynbee and I got a little drunk.”

Onan the barbarian?

2006-11-09T13:33:00.000+05:30

One more reason to read the TLS, says Robert Fulford:

Spare a tender thought for Onan: Has anyone in the Bible or anywhere else ever endured such slander? Imagine having a sin named after you when there's no evidence you ever committed it. For three centuries or more, "the sin of Onan" has meant auto-eroticism. Even the dictionaries libel him. Look up "onanism" in Oxford and the first word you see is "masturbation."...In truth, Onan was not (how shall I put this delicately?) a wanker. Check it out in Genesis 38. It says he practiced coitus interruptus, nothing else. The man was a pioneer of birth control.... The TLS, circulation 35,204, founded in 1902, may be the only paper that can be counted on for a forthright discussion of Onan.

Scenes from the Char Bagh

2006-11-01T15:06:00.000+05:30

Author comes out as gay, accuses publisher of blackmail. Ngugi wa Thiong'o launches a controversial book in Kenya--but it's kept so hush-hush for security reasons that no one shows up. The Kennedy clan skips the launch of Jack's Widow, which depicts Jacquie Kennedy Onassis as a CIA agent.

Na, the Babu doesn't care how exciting book launches are elsewhere in the world, they can't compare with the Last Mughal launch he went to yesterday.
"Bring your card or you won't be let in!" publishers Penguin warned us.
"The British Council's being tough about cards, so please bring yours," the author William Dalrymple warned us.
"We can't let you in unless you're carrying a card," the British Council warned us.
This was for very good reasons; the Council's recent research into security risks and terrorist activity indicates that over 80 per cent of bomb-carrying, book-launch-infiltrating terrorists NEVER carry the invite with them. Nor do they RSVP, the unmannerly louts.
The usually genial security chappie at the Council was taking no chances, he examined our cards carefully, just in case we were trying to sneak in using a Mughal-inspired Xmas card instead of the launch invite thingie with the portrait of Bahadur Shah Zafar (in Noel Coward dressing gown).

The Char Bagh, which is normally where louche journos sneak out for a smoke and a drink in the middle of the more dreary book launches, had been transformed with the soft light of earthern diyas, inviting mattresses and a stage decorated with chandeliers and hookahs into a suitably Mughal-court-meets-Umrao-Jaan-launch setting.
The Babu was charmed, though others were more critical. "The blasted soft light of those damned earthen diyas is attracting mosquitoes," grumbled a friend, who also pointed out that the inviting mattresses were paired with recalcitrant bolsters that shot into the next guest's lap the moment you leaned an elbow on them. Mine put up stiff resistance, but I did manage to wrestle it into submission in the end, and author Rana Dasgupta was kind enough to display his WWF Elbow-Lock move, guarantted to keep even the most ornery bolster pinned to the ground.

But the reading was brilliant--as this report suggests, we were all listening in hush as William Dalrymple, Mahmood Farooqui and Radhika Chopra blended Ghalib's ghazals, gut-wrenching accounts of the carcasses that littered Delhi's streets after the mutiny and Bahadur Shah Zafar's poignant poetry for an hour.

Two moments stood out. Mahmood reading Ghalib's letter to a friend in 1861, a few years after the events of 1857 had devastated Delhi:

"This whole city has become a desert. Delhi people still pride themselves on Delhi language! What pathetic faith! My dear man, when the Urdu Bazaar is no more, where is Urdu? By God, Delhi is no more a city, but a camp, a cantonment."

He had already lamented the loss of Delhi's poets, in 1859:

"Where is Mamnun? Where is Zauq? And where is Momin Khan? Two poets survive. One, Azurda--and he is silent: the other Ghalib, and he is lost in himself, in a stupor. None to write poetry, and none to judge its worth."

And William Dalrymple, who spent four years researching this book, reading his account of the funeral of the last Mughal emperor of India, in Rangoon in November 1862:

"The bier of the State Prisoner--as the deceased was referred to--was accompanied by two of his sons and an elderly, bearded mullah. No women were allowed to attend, and a small crowd from the bazaar who had somehow heard about the prisoner's death were kept away by armed guards... The ceremony was brief. The British authorities had made sure not only that the grave was already dug, but that quantities of line were on hand to guarantee the rapid decay of both bier and body. When the shortened funeral prayers had been recited--no lamentations or panegyrics were allowed--the earth was thrown in over the lime, and the turf carefully replaced so that within a month or so no mark would remain to indicate the place of burial."

So died Timur's descendant, now leading a posthumous life as a sort of Saint Zafar in Burma.

Then, of course, the qawwals from the Nizamuddin dargah started up, and the wine and gossip flowed like water, and people stumbled over the mattresses until the Council sensibly had the things removed, and the Babu was subjected to more bad shairi in the course of one evening than he has had to suffer over the last six months. The Babu's favourite quote of the evening was delivered by a wannabe cultural czarlet when the Nizami Bandhu's Sufi qawwalis replaced the ghazal singing:

"I can't stand ghazals, they give me a stomach ache, but qawwalis are another matter. Sufi, so good."

Lovecraft's phobias

2006-10-29T12:01:00.000+05:30

The reason I like H P Lovecraft?

He came up with book titles like Nyarlahotep, Azathoth and, in what might be an ominous portent for a pioneering Indian graphic novelist, The Doom That Comes to Sarnath.

Luc Sante has a more literary appraisal in The New York Review of Books, and a rather wonderful list of the things Lovecraft feared. Not all of them went bump in the night:

Although he was married briefly, and many years later his former wife was moved to state, peculiarly, that he was an "adequately excellent lover," it is clear from all available evidence that sexuality, procreation, and the human body itself were among the things that scared him the most.

He was also frightened of invertebrates, marine life in general, temperatures below freezing, fat people, people of other races, race-mixing, slums, percussion instruments, caves, cellars, old age, great expanses of time, monumental architecture, non-Euclidean geometry, deserts, oceans, rats, dogs, the New England countryside, New York City, fungi and molds, viscous substances, medical experiments, dreams, brittle textures, gelatinous textures, the color gray, plant life of diverse sorts, memory lapses, old books, heredity, mists, gases, whistling, whispering—the things that did not frighten him would probably make a shorter list.... The things that did not scare him generally are absent from his work.

SF in six words, and Seven

2006-10-29T11:08:00.000+05:30

Wired asked SF, fantasy and horror authors to take a shot at the six-word short story. My favourite?

Definitely Joss Whedon: "Gown removed carelessly. Head, less so.

The web-only article features short-shorts by William Gibson, Ben Bova, Robert Jordan ("Heaven falls. Details at eleven."), David Brin, and Margaret Atwood. Not that the Babu would presume to improve on Arthur C Clarke's relatively long short--"God said, 'Cancel Program GENESIS.' The universe ceased to exist"--but it did occur to him that a diligent editor might find a way to condense this down to six words: "The universe sucks. Ctrl-Alt-Del."

Indian SF is the Beast Glatisant of the SF menagerie, often sought, rarely found, so I was very glad to see a new anthology of SF for younger readers from Scholastic called Seven, which features work by Samit Basu, Anshumani Rudra, Anushka Ravishankar (no, not the sitar player, the writer woman with the real talent), Vandana Singh, Manjula Padmanabhan, and other writers, including, in an inexplicable lack of judgement on the part of the editors, myself. (Don't let that stop you, the rest of the stories are seriously good.)

I was travelling and couldn't be at the book launch, so The Editor at Scholastic abducted my husband instead (he's such a hardcore SF junkie, we fondly call him the space animal) and asked him to conduct the discussion. He enjoyed himself right up to the moment he read The Hindu's report on the launch, which read in part: "Devangshu Datta, a vivid lover, and avid reader of science fiction..." I've always been impressed by the high quality of The Hindu's reportage, but well, "vivid lover"? How do they know?

Darwin's Origin...

2006-10-26T10:48:00.001+05:30

...and a whole lot more, online.

Do read Darwin's Beagle diary, if you haven't already:

1832 Bahia

Feb 28th The houses are white & lofty & from the windows being narrow & long have a very light & elegant appearance. Convents, Porticos & public buildings vary the uniformity of the houses: the bay is scattered over with large ships; in short the view is one of the finest in the Brazils. - But their beauties are as nothing compared to the Vegetation; I believe from what I have seen Humboldts glorious descriptions are & will for ever be unparalleled: but even he with his dark blue skies & the rare union of poetry with science which he so strongly displays when writing on tropical scenery, with all this falls far short of the truth. The delight one experiences in such times bewilders the mind, - if the eye attempts to follow the flight of a gaudy butter-fly, it is arrested by some strange tree or fruit; if watching an insect one forgets it in the stranger flower it is crawling over, - if turning to admire the splendour of the scenery, the individual character of the foreground fixes the attention. The mind is a chaos of delight, out of which a world of future & more quiet pleasure will arise. - I am at present fit only to read Humboldt; he like another Sun illumines everything I behold. -

1832 Rio de Janeiro to M Video

July 13th Already in our day-dreams, have we returned heavily loaded with Cavies, Partridges, Snipes &c. - I believe the unexplored course of the Rio Negro will be investigated. - What can be imagined more exciting than following a great river through a totally unknown country?- Every thing shows we are steering for barbarous regions, all the officers have stowed away their razors, & intend allowing their beards to grow in a truly patriarchal fashion. -

1832 Baia Blanca

Sept 15th a fine Ostrich tried to escape; the Gauchos pursued it at a reckless pace, each man whirling the balls round his head; the foremost at last threw them, in an instant the Ostrich rolled over & over, its legs being fairly lashed together by the thong. - Its dying struggles were most violent. - The men then formed a ring & drove to the centre several cavies; they only killed one; but their riding was most excellent, especially in the quickness & precision with which they turn. - The horses are soon fatigued from such violent exercise & it is necessary often to change them & pick out fresh ones from the herd which always accompanies a party. - At this time of year, the eggs of the ostrich is their chief prize. - In this one day they found 64, out of which 44 were in two nests; the rest scattered about by ones or twos. - They also catch great numbers of Armadilloes. - In the middle of the day they lighted a fire & soon roasted some eggs & some Armadilloes in their hard cases: - They had neither water, salt or bread; of the two latter for weeks together they never taste; so that it makes little difference to them where they live. -
Like to snails, all their property is on their backs & their food around them. - It was very interesting to watch, whilst seated.

Supersizing speech

2006-10-26T10:30:00.000+05:30

John Humphreys explains why we need to reclaim language:

The supermarkets are masters of the art – always trying to persuade us how thrilling it will be if we share our shopping experience with them. Note "experience". We don't shop any longer. We have an "experience".
At the heart of this hype process, in which the "experience" is all, individual words are given an even sharper 180 degree change of direction. Take "enjoy". You're sitting in a restaurant, the waitress brings your meal and, with a sweet smile, says, "Enjoy!" I want to say: "Don't you know that 'enjoy' is a transitive not an intransitive verb? You should say, 'Enjoy it!' not 'Enjoy!'."

Amen. Out there, a small but hardy band of stalwarts do care, for instance about why the New Yorker would refer to a "six-liter bottle of Bordeaux" when it might have used the term "Imperial of Bordeaux" instead. (Personally speaking, the Babu likes his wine in Jeroboams, if not Nebuchadnezzars, but an Imperial will do in a pinch.)

Reading at random: Parashuram

2006-10-17T16:06:00.000+05:30

Sukanta Chaudhuri and his colleagues recently came out with a translation of the stories and miscellaneous writings of 'Parashuram', one of Bengal's best-loved, and most feared, satirists.
Here's a selection from 'The Scripture Read Backwards', a "what if India had ruled over England instead" piece Parashuram wrote around 1928-29:

The Richmond Banga-Ingiya Pathshala. Mr Cram, pandit in charge. Tom, Dick, Harry and other boys.

...Dick: "Where's the Meti Pond, Pandit-mashai?
Cram. Why don't you look at that map in front of you? It's that sea near Italy. It used to be called the Mediterranean. The Indians couldn't pronounce the name, so they started calling it the Meti Pond--just as they call Ulster Belestera, Switzerland Chhachhurabad, Bordeaux Booze-shop, Manchester Nimta. Get on with your reading.

Then there's this, From the commercial columns of The Rashtrabit:

PURE JOY-LADDUS. Don't ruin your health by eating English biscuits larded with fat. Try our Joy-laddus. They strengthen your teeth. Nothing but ground rice and molasses. Not touched by machine: made by Bengali women with their own hands. Five shillings a packet. Available everywher. Manufacturers: Rasamay Das, Lizard Market, Calcutta.

AMBERGRIS POWDER. Memsahibs need not feel frustrated any more. This miraculous powder will remove the unfortunate natural pallor of their complexion of Bengali women. If you want to enhance the dark effect, mix in a little verdigris. As used by Ramachandra-ji. Price five shillings a phial. Marketed by Sheikh Azhar, Leadenhall Street, India House, London.

The first Scots Mughal

2006-10-17T15:28:00.000+05:30

Aamer Hussein--who is, for all his fans, with book again, due to deliver next year--has a lovely review of William Dalrymple's The Last Mughal:

On my shelf is the 13th edition (published in 1942) of Begamat ke Aansu, a collection of chronicles of what befell members of the Mughal court during and after the Indian Uprising of 1857. Unrelenting and spare, the book is all the more compelling for its simplicity. Known to several generations of readers of Urdu, and part of oral lore as well, its plain tales of arbitrary punishment, displacement and uprooted lives record the devastation of a thriving culture. They provide a compelling alternative to the views of official historians of the Raj, whose perspectives on the so-called Mutiny are inevitably those of the victorious.
Hasan Nizami, author of these chronicles, is only one among the many indigenous and vernacular sources referred to, and often echoed or endorsed, by William Dalrymple in his diligently researched and densely informative new book....
Dalrymple does not merely map the Uprising, although its tumultuous events do take up much of his book. By choosing to focus on one, major city and its native and foreign residents, he supports the thesis that, far from being a homogeneous movement against the growing supremacy of the British, the revolt emerged from the multi-faceted grievances of an eclectic group. It encompassed rulers, artisans and peasants, with their varied regional interests.

The New Statesman has an excerpt from The Last Mughal:

[In the aftermath of the Uprising]...Delhi was left an empty ruin. Those city-dwellers who survived were driven out into the countryside to fend for themselves. Though the royal family had surrendered peacefully, most of the emperor's 16 sons were tried and hanged, while three were shot in cold blood, having first freely given up their arms, then been told to strip naked. "In 24 hours I disposed of the principal members of the house of Timur the Tartar," Captain William Hodson wrote to his sister the following day. "I am not cruel, but I confess I did enjoy the opportunity of ridding the earth of these wretches."

More from The Telegraph.co.uk on the writing of the book:

Over the past four years, my colleagues Mahmoud Farooqi and Bruce Wannell and I have been working through many of the 20,000 virtually unexamined Persian and Urdu documents, known as the Mutiny Papers, which we found on the shelves of the National Archives of India. These allow the events of 1857 to be seen for the first time from a proper Indian perspective.
It is a commonplace of books about the Indian Mutiny that they lament the absence of Indian sources and the corresponding need to rely on the huge quantities of British material – memoirs, travelogues, letters, histories – which carry with them only the British version of events. Yet all this time in the National Archives there existed mountains of chits, pleas, orders, petitions, complaints, receipts, rolls of attendance and lists of casualties, predictions of victory and promises of loyalty, notes from spies of dubious reliability and letters from eloping lovers – all neatly bound in string.

Found the link to Indy Hazra's piece where he discovers the predictable resemblance between Willy D and the Mughals, and a slightly more jarring resemblance to George Nathaniel Curzon. This is from the e-paper version, so if they ask you to register and you hate filling up forms, punch in username: HurreeBabu and password: hateslogins.

Thande ka Tadka

2006-10-17T15:20:00.000+05:30

The Babu isn't sure what Ruchir Joshi's drinking these days, but it certainly isn't Pepsi. Or Coke:

We are a country where international Cola companies find it far cheaper to hire the most expensive movie stars to defend their interests than to clean up the bad chemicals in their plants. We are a country where these stars ask no questions of the companies they front on TV. We are a country where a star like Amir can, in effect, say “Look, my dear public, you love me, don’t you? Well, I am asking you to translate your love for me into trust for my paymasters at Coca-Cola.”
I mean, can you imagine Tom Cruise or Hugh Grant going on national TV after a huge controversy such as this, pulling out a bottle of suspect product from the assembly line and taking a swig? And asking the US or British public to “trust” the product, to let their children quaff it, on the basis of a set-up ad in which, in these days of digital colour-manipulation, the hero-dude could be drinking anything from cranberry juice to the best Pinot Noir wine? No, this can only happen in a media-republic that is even more Banana than the US, a country like India, which is one of the few large economies where the Pesti-Colas can still hope to expand their markets.

Franks and beans

2006-10-17T15:11:00.000+05:30

Post-Frankfurt, post-mortem:

Mukund Padmanabhan in The Hindu:

The choice of India as the Guest of Honour (for an unprecedented second time, the first in 1986) is invariably explained in economic terms — as a country "on the rise", as a potentially huge market. Regrettably, literary prowess is mentioned almost as an aside.....
With 70 invited writers, a cultural show and a Dilli Haat crafts bazaar, India makes its presence adequately felt. But one wished that the country's exhibitors had put in a little more thought and effort into doing up their stands. A few posters are pretty much all that is there by way of decoration. In contrast, Hall 8 — where the U.S. and the English publishers are on display — is a pleasure to walk through. The care that has gone into the designing of almost every stand invites you to stop... and look.

In the Indian Express, TLM's editor, Antara Dev Sen, asks, "Have we progressed since 1986?"
We lost a great opportunity at Frankfurt. We have scores of excellent writers trapped in their own regional languages. With proper translations, we could have brought them onto the world stage and flaunted our multi-lingual, multi-cultural literaryscape. In the long run, it would have worked better than parading cookery books, or throwing Karan Johar to the mob among cut-outs of Shahrukh Khan.

Roses are red, cacti blue...

2006-10-13T15:04:00.000+05:30

Mitali Saran explains how to enunciate clearly when you're saying it with flowers:

The Shiv Sena is sending roses to the Varanasi police force; students are sending get-well-soon emails to Arjun Singh, and it is rumoured that even Sushmita Sen sent a cactus to Aishwarya Rai.
I, too, want to send flowers to the Municipal Corporation of Delhi, to let it know how badly I feel about whatever infirmity has led to the urban planning catastrophe that is Delhi, and to the devil’s choice between short-term individual livelihoods and collective long-term survival which we are being forced to make today....
Saying it with flowers means finding the right blossoms, so I have composed a pithy bouquet of two very special flowers. The first is a Titan arum, or Amorphophallus titanum, (which roughly translates as “gigantic shapeless penis” for reasons that a brief glimpse makes clear).

I wish she had a blog, but in terms of publicising herself, Mitali's something of a shrinking violet. Here's a link to some of her Business Standard columns--go, enjoy.

Vande Mataram: the seven crore question

2006-10-13T15:01:00.000+05:30

In the Calcutta Telegraph, Ashok Mitra deconstructs Vandemataram:

What is of much greater significance, the mother hailed with such fervour in Vandemataram is, without a shred of doubt, not Mother India, but Mother Bengal. Consider, for instance, the 8th, 9th and 10th lines in the song: “saptakotikantha-kala-kala-ninadakarale,/ dvisaptakotibhujairdhritakhrakalabale/ abala kano ma at bale”. A rough translation would be: “seven crore voices roar their oath to you, seven crore pairs of arms with raised swords keep vigil for you, why should then one dare to call you powerless?” The population of Bharat, that is India, was surely a goodly number more than seven crore circa the 1880s, despite heinous oppression by foreign rulers, including denial of food to their subjects....
....The early nationalists who latched on to the song and wanted to project it as India’s national anthem were not unaware of the restricted horizon Bankim had in mind. An embarrassment was involved in the assumption that the song as originally written was not a hosanna to Mother India. In the first decade of the 20th century, leaders of the Indian National Congress were advised by some zealots to do a smart piece of editing: just cross out the reference to “seven crore” and substitute it with “thirty crore” (trimsa koti) and, similarly, replace “twice seven crore of arms” by “twice thirty crore” (dwitrimsa koti).

Rediff and the Indian Telegraph Act, 1885

2006-10-13T14:48:00.000+05:30

As the head of Rediff.com, which also offers a very popular email service, Ajit Balakrishnan's company often has to deal with jealous spouses wanting access to their partner's email accounts, organisations wanting to read an employee's mail-and police requests. In this column for the Business Standard, he explains why the Indian government gets away with asking to read your mail:

We were quite content to play this routine out—the police inspector sending us a list of names and email IDs to track, us politely asking for the Home Secretary’s authorisation, which would come a few weeks later with some names dropped from the original list. Till, one day, on the list of names the government wanted watched was the name of a nationally known social activist and writer....

(Babu's note: This should be pretty easy to guess, people.)

Balakrishnan and his colleagues at Rediff consulted a retired judge for advice and were told:

“You see, the law that governs this kind of case, the Indian Telegraph Act, 1885, was enacted with the shadow of the 1857 ‘mutiny’ still over the Raj government, and is really an instrument to control such events rather than to govern the evolution of an industry. There is nothing you can do but comply if the request comes with the proper authorisation.”
As we left his chambers, the issues started to become clearer in my mind. For the hundred years from 1885, the year that the British Raj introduced the telegraph system in India, it was seen primarily as an instrument for keeping colonial control. And I guess from Independence till the mid 1990s, the post-colonial government continued this perspective and added to this the function of spying on political opponents. All that a politician or a bureaucrat had to do was call up the posts and telegraphs department and tapping would commence unhindered, with no one to raise legal or civil rights issues.

Read the column to see how Rediff handled this specific situation, but Balakrishnan's experience explains a great deal about censorship in India. It may not be prevalent, or even the norm, but the government--and to a great extent, the average Indian citizen--assumes that the rights of the state will always outweigh the citizen's right to privacy.

Orhan Pamuk wins Nobel

2006-10-12T16:43:00.001+05:30

Sometimes, those Swedish academics get it right. The Nobel Prize in Literature 2006 goes to Orhan Pamuk, "who in the quest for the melancholic soul of his native city has discovered new symbols for the clash and interlacing of cultures."

From an interview with The Borzoi Reader:

To be influenced by the western ways of portraiture is a dilemma for the traditional Islamic painter who is devoted to repetition and purification of traditional forms. Beyond this lie two different ways of seeing, painting, and even representing the world. One is that of seeing the world through the eyes of any individual person—looking at things from our humble point of view. The other is seeing the world through God’s eyes, from high above as the Islamic painters did, and perceiving the totality of, say a battle from above. The latter is more like seeing with the mind’s eye, rather than the eye itself.
I tried to tell my story in the manner of these Persian masters. These two distinctive ways of seeing the world and narrating stories are of course related to our cultures, histories, and what is now popularly called identities. How much are they in conflict? In my novel they even kill each other because of this conflict between east and west. But, of course, the reader, I hope, realizes that I do not believe in this conflict.

From the Nobel Academy site, a comprehensive bio-bibliography.

Pamuk's NYRB page; this is from his May 2006 essay, Freedom to Write:

But to respect the humanity and religious beliefs of minorities is not to suggest that we should limit freedom of thought on their behalf. Respect for the rights of religious or ethnic minorities should never be an excuse to violate freedom of speech. We writers should never hesitate on this matter, no matter how "provocative" the pretext. Some of us have a better understanding of the West, some of us have more affection for those who live in the East, and some, like me, try to keep our hearts open to both sides of this slightly artificial divide, but our natural attachments and our desire to understand those unlike us should never stand in the way of our respect for human rights.

From Pamuk's interview with The Paris Review:

...This theme of impersonation is reflected in the fragility Turkey feels when faced with Western culture. After writing The White Castle, I realized that this jealousy—the anxiety about being influenced by someone else—resembles Turkey’s position when it looks west. You know, aspiring to become Westernized and then being accused of not being authentic enough. Trying to grab the spirit of Europe and then feeling guilty about the imitative drive. The ups and downs of this mood are reminiscent of the relationship between competitive brothers.

From a New Yorker profile:

Pamuk waved me out onto the balcony. He pointed to the illuminated mosques on the far shore, then to a Russian oil tanker plowing north on the Bosporus toward the Black Sea. As he was describing the bridges across the Golden Horn, a muezzin, that buzzy summons to prayer present in all Orientalist narratives, wailed reliably in midsentence, and Pamuk laughed. "Sometimes my agent will call from New York, and the muezzin will start," he said. "You can tell that at the other end of the phone line he is thinking, Ah! The exotic East!"

The Complete Review has links to the collected reviews of Pamuk's Istanbul, My Name is Red and Snow.

PEN's Orhan Pamuk Page.

Yes! Kiran wins

2006-10-11T07:50:00.000+05:30

Kiran Desai wins the Booker.

From The Telegraph: Miss Desai spent eight years writing her book, The Inheritance of Loss, and becomes the youngest-ever woman at the age of 35 to win the award.

From The Independent: "To my mother, I owe a debt so profound and so great that this book feels as much hers as it does mine," she said. "It was written... in her wisdom and kindness, in cold winters in her house when I was in pieces. I really owe her this book so enormously. A minute isn't enough to convey it."
But with extraordinary composure, she thanked all the other writers saying: " I know the best book does not win. The compromise wins."
Yet, any suggestion that it was a compromise choice was dismissed by Hermione Lee, the chair of the judges, who said there was "no ambiguity" unlike when she was a judge in 1981 when the comparatively unknown Salman Rushdie controversially beat DM Thomas's The White Hotel with Midnight's Children.

Links to previous reviews/ interviews:

Jai Arjun Singh's interview with Kiran Desai, on Jabberwock:

She’s so fond of relating stories - about the rodent population in Harlem, for instance, which led to the formation of a “Neighbourhood Rat Committee” - that it’s no surprise when she promises not to dally as much over her next book (possibly a novel set in New York) as she did with this one. “It might make more sense,” she concedes with a laugh, “to spread the stories out over many books, and publish them more frequently!”

Pankaj Mishra's review of Inheritance of Loss in the NYT:

What binds these seemingly disparate characters is a shared historical legacy and a common experience of impotence and humiliation. "Certain moves made long ago had produced all of them," Desai writes, referring to centuries of subjection by the economic and cultural power of the West. But the beginnings of an apparently leveled field in a late-20th-century global economy serve merely to scratch those wounds rather than heal them.

The Hindu's Mukund Padmanabhan interviewed Kiran Desai in Frankfurt, just before the Booker win:
I could have carried on [writing] forever if I didn't want to make a novel out of it. It's amazing to me when I write in this way ... it's so easy to exit the world. It's quite shocking really. The door is open and you go. Writing can be a dangerous activity if you really let yourself go entirely. Mentally, it is a strange place to be in.

Marjorie Kehe, The Christian Science Monitor:

All of the novel's characters eventually come to share Sai's suspicion that life is more often defined by loss than by fulfillment.
And yet, nothing sours the warm heart at the center of this novel. Desai is sometimes compared to Salman Rushdie, and the energy and fecundity of imagination in her works do make them somewhat akin to his. But the tenderness in her novels is all her own.

The Rediff interview, conducted by Lindsay Perreira:
I wrote all the Kalimpong bits in Kalimpong, staying in a house lent to me during the rainy season. It was very wild and beautiful, rain hammering down, mist and fog. I lived alone and learned both the hard and the beautiful way what it means to be a writer....
..I think there's always a degree of loss in being an immigrant. It feels as if one will never be able to tell an entire story ever again. There'll be an aspect of living half a life, having only half a story to tell. We tend to hope for a simplicity of truth, a wholeness which is rarely delivered us.
My book examines lives that are forced, because of circumstance, to be those of hypocrisy, of gaps and fears, or of truths that cannot be simply attained and added up into anything trustworthy. They conflict with other peoples' ideas of things, or they belong to times past and stories that are lost or forgotten.

Aamer Hussein's review, in The Independent:
Nationalism, migration, varieties of belonging: in her hugely ambitious second novel, Kiran Desai gives these grand themes an entirely new spin, unearthing their sources in earlier decades. Is it best to stay in a small place, "the sweet drabness of home"? If so, do we have a right to that territory, and who can stake a claim? These questions shape the destinies of Desai's characters: "the most commonplace of them, those quite mismatched with the larger-than-life questions, caught up in the mythic battles of past and present, justice vs injustice - the most ordinary swept up in extraordinary hatred, because extraordinary hatred was, after all, a commonplace event."

I'd done a brief review, way back in January, for India Today.

Before the Booker

2006-10-10T19:04:00.000+05:30

Waiting for the winner of the Booker to be announced?

Read John Crace's parodies of the shortlisted authors while you twiddle your thumbs.

Here's his take on Kiran Desai's Inheritance of Loss:

The description of the mist moving like a water creature across the great flanks of the Himalayas possessed of ocean shadows and depths told Sai that she had inadvertently found her way into a lyrical evocation of post- colonial multiculturalism. She picked up a copy of National Geographic. "That should add a nice post-modern ironic nod to globalisation," she reckoned.
Jemu patted Mutt affectionately. Mutt was a good name for a dog that belonged to a grumpy retired judge who still retained a deep affection for the English way of life, he thought. And dogs were so much more predictable than his 16-year-old granddaughter, Sai, who had come to stay with him.
The cook cut up the deliberately misspelt pertaytas. What did it matter if he was uneducated, he said to himself, so long as my son Biju is making a career for himself in New York.

Gourevitch's Encounters

2006-10-10T18:44:00.000+05:30

The Washington Post gives Philip Gourevitch, editor of The Paris Review, an approving nod:

George Plimpton is dead, alas, but the magazine he founded, the Paris Review, is alive and well and resounding with the voices of Salman Rushdie, Stephen King, Joseph Stalin, a Serb terrorist, a Chinese public toilet manager and an American woman who impersonated a fictitious female impersonator.

Gourevitch succeeded the late and legendary George Plimpton, who appears to have inspired websites every bit as eccentric as his life.

And the latest issue of The Paris Review includes a short story by Mohsin Hamid:

Looking back now, I see the power of that system, pragmatic and effective, like so much else in America. We international students were sourced from around the globe, sifted not only by well-honed standardized tests but by painstakingly customized evaluations until the best and the brightest of us had been identified. I myself had among the top exam results in Pakistan and was besides a soccer player good enough to compete on the varsity team, which I did until I damaged my knee in my sophomore year. Students like me were given visas and scholarships—complete financial aid, mind you—and invited into the ranks of the meritocracy. In return, we were expected to contribute our talents to your society, the society we were joining. And for the most part, we were happy to do so. I certainly was, at least at first.

Chabon on "idealized nightmares"

2006-10-10T18:43:00.000+05:30

From Michael Chabon's blog:

In October 1964, STERANKO (one senses that he might like it written thus) produced a special number of Genii, The Conjuror’s Magazine, dedicated to Houdini. In it he revealed, in startlingly generous detail, many of the secrets of the liberationist’s art. To my eternal sorrow, I learned of the existence of this remarkable issue when it was too late to be of assistance to me in writing The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay.
Among the many mad pleasures of Genii, Volume 29, No. 2, are a number of drawings, unsigned but unmistakably the work of STERANKO himself, illustrating a series of truly bizarre liberationist stunts. These images do not, for the most part, depict real, or even possible, escapes; in their modest way they are in the nature of Piranesi’s prisons, or Boullée’s monuments, or Lorraine’s landscapes: dream contrivances, idealized nightmares, deeply rooted, it seems to me, in the vibrant, desperate imaginings of a gifted boy trapped by the crushing prognosis and swift passage of a coal town boyhood. I know how they would have delighted the imagination of Joe Kavalier.

The Art of James Steranko: online gallery

Sixer for Monty, pythons for Piccadilly

2006-10-09T18:54:00.000+05:30

From The Times: MONTY PANESAR, the surprise hero of England’s cricket win against Pakistan this summer, is to cap his remarkable six months as an international player by signing a deal to write his autobiography.

(Panesar picked up a three-hundred thousand pound advance from Bloomfield. Not a bad score, no?)

Other desi characters making deal news: Kumari, Goddess of Gotham, created by Amanda Lees, star of a three-book series that's just sold well, in which Kumari, goddess-in-training, finds herself transported to New York. Bachao, Ma, bachao, and sorry, I'm not going to translate that!

R K Narayan and Friends

2006-10-09T18:41:00.000+05:30

N Ram uses the occasion of R K Narayan's birth centenary to explain why his work will "still stand tall", when several of today's stars have been forgotten:

For Narayan's `discoverer' Greene, it seemed, nothing could better Swami and Friends, the typescript of which charmed the English writer in 1934-35. Most critics are likely to consider the eighth novel, The Guide (1958), as the writer's most imaginative and accomplished. However, each reader might have her or his personal favourite — The English Teacher (1945) or The Financial Expert (1952) perhaps. (Narayan once related to us what he claimed was the real life story of a practical banker who, beguiled by the title of the sixth novel, ordered dozens of copies for the edification of his employees and then, when he discovered its fictional content, didn't know what to do with his paid-for stock.)

And Mysore blogChurumuri, meanwhile, continues its R K Narayan campaign.

Rushdie in residence at Emory

2006-10-09T13:33:00.000+05:30

The Atlanta college gets Salman Rushdie as a writer-in-residence for five years (but will he actually teach?) and his collected papers, for an undisclosed but presumably handsome amount.
It is perfectly true that the collected papers include two unpublished novels, but there is no truth in the rumour that these are the lost, early masterpieces Grimiest: The Collected Dribblings of Snotface and Teatime's Foetuses.
(I jest, but in truth, one of the unpublished novels was The Book of the Pir.*. Information courtesy the Rushdie Timeline. I was wondering whether the second was Madame Rama, which featured Indira Gandhi as a key character, but The Times says it's The Antagonist, described as a "Pynchonesque" novel set in London. Call me a coward but I'm backing away rapidly at the thought of ever reading this one.)

* Minor caveat here: the Timeline says that Book of the Pir featured a character from the advertising world called Hal Valance, but it doesn't mention that the novel wasn't set in the ad world. Ian Hamilton mentioned in a profile of Rushdie he did for the New Yorker that The Book of the Pir was about a Muslim guru (sic) who is co-opted by the leaders of a military coup in an unnamed Islamic country to become the figurehead President. Sounds good, until you read the bit where Rushdie explains it was written in "sub-Joyce". I presume Hal Valance (since Rushdie worked in the Bombay ad industry, anyone prepared to speculate about who inspired the Valance character?) popped up in a cameo role.

The best of "British" fiction

2006-10-09T13:28:00.000+05:30

With a little help from former outposts of the Empire. This round-up of the 100 best novels of the last 25 years from basically everywhere that's not the Americas or the North Pole makes interesting reading. And while I wouldn't disagree with Coetzee's Disgrace heading the list, it would have been so nice if Smiley had won.

Robert McCrum writes:

"There was, too, a cut-off problem. 1980 is an arbitrary date. It excludes, by the narrowest of margins, VS Naipaul's A Bend in the River (1979), by any standards one of the great novels of our time. And then, what do you do about John le Carre? Smiley himself was flourishing, imaginatively, until the Wall came down and the three main Smiley novels, written in the 1970s, were republished, in a single volume, in 1994. In the end, le Carre was represented by A Perfect Spy (1986). At one early stage in our polling, it looked as if he might win.
Both Naipaul and le Carre, in different ways, connect the reader to the Victorian hinterland of the contemporary English novel. This poses another question. What might a similar exercise look like for 1880-1905? Ask that question and you get a sense of the complexity of such surveys.
Time is a ruthless critic: RL Stevenson or Thomas Hardy? HG Wells or Joseph Conrad? EM Forster or Rudyard Kipling? Heart of Darkness (1902) or Jude The Obscure (1895)? The Time Machine (1896) or Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886)? Nostromo (1904) or Where Angels Fear to Tread (1905)? This is, of course, a debate that must exclude Henry James at the peak of his powers (Daisy Miller, 1879; Portrait of a Lady, 1881) on the grounds of his American citizenship."

I go blong Vanuatu...

2006-10-09T12:24:00.000+05:30

...definitely the country that has my all-time favourite national anthem:

Yumi, Yumi, yumi I glad long talem se
Yumi, yumi, yumi ol man blong Vanuatu
God i givim ples ya long yumi,
Yumi glat tumas long hem,
Yumi strong mo yumi fri long hem,
Yumi brata evriwan!

Next on the favourites list? Japan's economical ode to brevity.

Topping the list of anthems that are definitely not for people with sore feet? The 158-strophe-long Greek national anthem, though this is the bit that usually gets sung.

And in Afghanistan, composing a new national anthem tested poets' skills to the maximum:

"According to the constitution, the anthem must be in Pashtu, has to contain the words “Allah hu Akbar” (God is Great), and it should include the names of all major Afghan ethnic groups....The search is on for a new text, but Afghanistan’s poets are threatening to boycott the process because of the near-impossible task of incorporating all the required political messages into the verses."

New, improved Kitabkhana

2006-10-08T11:58:00.000+05:30

Whyphor you read Kitabkhana in Babu English when you are having so much other option?

Courtesy The Dialectizer, my humble blog in:

1. Pig Latin:
Ifelay appenedhay ecausebay Iyay urnedtay ethay agespay~~Albertoyay Anguelmay

2. Elmer Fudd:
If you wook at the wist of the eighteen peopwe who get to choose the next Nobew Wauweate, the weawwy scawy bit is the yeaw of biwth--two membews bown in 1918, eight bown in the 1920s, fouw in the 1930s, two in the 1940s, two in the 1950s. Oh, dat scwewy wabbit!

3. Redneck:
Salman Rushdie writes t'Amitava Kumar:

"Dear Mr Kumar,

Mah attenshun has been drawn t'yer website, whar yo' claim thet ah thrett uped t'cancel mah viset to Vassar eff'n yo' were involved wif it. This hyar is inaccurate. At no time did ah thrett up ennythin' of th' so't. ah did indeed tell th' o'ganizer, Joanne Long, thet ah was unwillin' t'share a stage wif yo', an', af'er she had read whut yo' haf writ about me in th' past, she unnerstood whuffo' ah w'd haf thet view, an' axed yo' t'stan' down, as enny fool kin plainly see. It might haf been mo'e dignified of yo' t'leave this hyar matter private, but as yo' haf chosen not t'do so, yo' ought at least t'strive fo' accuracy in yer repo'tin' of it."

4. And the truly weird Swedish Chef:
Vednesdey, September 27, 2006
Zee Peuleeni Iffffect
Nuncy Lee Fun mekes Chreestupher Peuleeni luuk leeke-a a duddereeng greybeerd. Bork bork bork!

Found in Translation Department:

Tagore's The Gardener, in Cockney

Rushdie's Shalimar the Clown, as reworked by a Swedish Chef

Joyce's Ulysses, suitably hacked.

Sarojini Naidu's An Indian Love Song, the redneck version.

Arundhati Roy's Public Power in the Age of Empire, in Pig Latin.

Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf's In The Line of Fire, rendered in Moron.

Thursday next...

2006-10-06T22:56:00.000+05:30

...says the Swedish Academy.
This report does a valiant job of the usual "We have no real news, but we're trying" Nobel story, and mentions:
"The Swedish Academy also tapped two writers to replace two members who died this year."
If you look at the list of the eighteen people who get to choose the next Nobel Laureate, the really scary bit is the year of birth--two members born in 1918, eight born in the 1920s, four in the 1930s, two in the 1940s, two in the 1950s. The two new members were both born in the 1940s, so I guess this is the Academy's way of ensuring that the average age remain dangerously youthful.

Houelleraiser (Retd)

2006-10-06T22:36:00.000+05:30

Sam Lipsyte spends a week on the road with Michel Houellebecq waiting for the man to do his bad, bad thing; all he gets is "a kind of heavy-lidded stare that says, “Anytime You Want to Shut Your Stupid Mouth I’ll Be Quite Delighted."

How to review a Famous Slacker novel

2006-10-06T22:17:00.000+05:30

In bed.

India at Frankfurt

2006-10-06T22:11:00.000+05:30

The Hindu delivers the good news:

Bengali writer Mahashweta Devi, the Grande Dame of Indian literature at 80 years, kicked off the Frankfurt Book Fair on Wednesday...."Sixty years after our hard-won Independence, the khadi sari is India just as much as the mini-skirt and the backless choli is. A bullock cart is India just as much as is the latest Toyota and Mercedes car," she said. "Illiteracy haunts us, yet the same India produces men and women at the forefront of medicine, science and technology."
India is guest of honour with a packed programme of readings and debates. The cultural events will feature dance, drama, films and yoga demonstrations. Even the Left-leaning national daily Tageszeitung, recently in the news for creating a political storm between Germany and Poland through its irreverent reporting on Poland's new leaders, got into the mood, printing its masthead on Wednesday in Hindi.

And Deutsche Welle looks at the other side, in this thoughtful piece by Sonia Phalnikar:

...There was standing room only as Amit Chaudhuri and Shashi Tharoor, both internationally acclaimed Indian authors who write in English, took to the stage. In contrast, only a handful turned up a few halls away to listen to Shafi Shauq, one of the most important contemporary poets and critics from northern Indian Kashmir, who writes in his native Kashmiri....
"Indian literature is still largely seen as the literature of authors who write in English. Regional literature hardly makes a dent in the West's consciousness even though it's such a diverse scene," said Peter Ripkin, head of the Frankfurt-based Society for the Promotion of Asian, African and Latin American literature.
The problem isn't exactly new. Two decades ago when India was the guest of honor at the Frankfurt Book fair, organizers paid much lip service to promoting regional literature. But since then just about 40 titles have been translated from Indian languages into German.

Phalnikar has another piece here on Indian writers in English at the fair; Ilija Trojanow compares three recent Bombay books (Suketu Mehta's Maximum City, Vikram Chandra's Sacred Games and Altaf Tyrewala's No God in Sight).

Indian authors at Frankfurt: Shashi Tharoor talks about his future career options ("Will you become a full-time author now?" "I don't know if I can afford that, frankly...); Indu Sundaresan explains why Mehrunissa fascinated her to Frankfurt audiences via a webchat; Amit Chaudhuri speaks to Deutsche Welle about the elephants in the living room of Indian writing; Neelesh Mishra takes a look at writers on the margins; and if you read German, here's an interview with Kiran Desai; and Vikram Seth explains why you can't have a single "school of Indian writing".

Run, Updike, run

2006-10-02T22:51:00.000+05:30

"Why, oh why, did Salman Rushdie in his new novel call one of his major characters Maximilian Ophuls?" John Updike, reviewing Rushdie's Shalimar the Clown in the New Yorker last year.

"A name is just a name. 'Why, oh why ... ?' Well, why not? Somewhere in Las Vegas there's probably a male prostitute called 'John Updike'." Salman Rushdie answers the question in the Guardian this year. After that, saying that he didn't subscribe to the very predominantly English admiration of Updike seems kind of redundant.

Rushdie's had other things on his mind, anyway, like the Anish Kapoor sculpture based on his work:

The centrepiece is a sculpture made in collaboration with the novelist Salman Rushdie, consisting of two bronze boxes, joined by a wedge of malleable red wax, and inscribed with a text by Rushdie based on an episode from the Arabian Nights. Inside the open boxes is a grisly pile of dark-crimson globs that look for all the world like freshly extracted internal organs.
"It's very gory," the artist says with a mischievous smile. "Salman has written a text about death, blood, men and women, domination – a kind of diary of slaughter. The first sentence says, 'So how many women did they actually kill?' And I thought I would make a shrine. I've been making works with bloody things for a good long while now. Red's a colour I feel strongly about."

Can't wait to see it. And we have it on good authority that none of the "dark-crimson globs" were, in fact, extracted from the innards of Mr Updike.

The Paolini Effect

2006-09-27T13:58:00.000+05:30

Nancy Li Fan makes Christopher Paolini look like a doddering greybeard.

The Observer reports:

A fantasy novel about tribes of warring birds, written by a gifted 11-year-old girl who lives in the southern-most province of China, is to be published worldwide in English.
The young author, Nancy Yi Fan, won the extraordinary opportunity by simply emailing her manuscript to the chief executive of HarperCollins, Jane Friedman, at the publisher's New York office.
Fan has since been hailed as a prodigy by her editors who will use her book in a new attempt to establish the firm in China . Her story, Swordbird, is an epic allegory about the struggle for peace and will be printed in this country in the new year.

No offence to Fan, who may well be a child prodigy. But this looks like the Paolini Effect at work: the backstory sells the book, and unless it's putrid-terrible, what kind of evil reviewer would slag off an 11-year-old author?
And well, on one hand, more power to Li Fan and Paolini: at eleven and 16 respectively, most of us were scraping the chewing gum off our pigtails, not signing book deals. But does anybody remember, say, Flavia Bujor? Teen sensation, wrote The Prophecy of Stones at the age of 12? Or Catherine Webb? Neither did badly with their "teen sensation" books, but both became the publishing industry equivalent of the two-or-three hit boy/ girl bands.
This CSM story explored what happens when the very young write that first book.

The General in his Labyrinth

2006-09-26T12:07:00.000+05:30

This month's bestselling Asian author?
General Pervez Musharraf.
Among the long and growing list of people who won't be queueing up for autographs now that they've read his memoirs:
The Indian Army.
The CIA.
Manmohan Singh.

On the other hand, he has George Bush on his PR team, though Bush might leave the position now that he's actually read the book.

Sincerely, Mr Rushdie

2006-09-26T11:50:00.000+05:30

Salman Rushdie writes to Amitava Kumar:

"Dear Mr Kumar,

My attention has been drawn to your website, where you claim that I threatened to cancel my visit to Vassar if you were involved with it. This is inaccurate. At no time did I threaten anything of the sort. I did indeed tell the organizer, Joanne Long, that I was unwilling to share a stage with you, and, after she had read what you have written about me in the past, she understood why I would have that view, and asked you to stand down. It might have been more dignified of you to leave this matter private, but as you have chosen not to do so, you ought at least to strive for accuracy in your reporting of it."

Amitava had prepared a generous introduction for Rushdie, but hasn't been quite as generous in the past, as in this piece on Rushdie and Naipaul and this review, which begins with the question: Is Salman Rushdie God?
Amitava is well within his rights to dissect Rushdie's work in the manner he's done in the past, even if a lot of it has been a glorification of Naipaul at the expense of Rushdie. And Rushdie is well within his rights to decline to share a stage with a gadfly reviewer. Bit silly of the man to put his thin skin on display, though.

Kiran and Kalimpong

2006-09-26T11:43:00.000+05:30

The Toronto Star interviews Kiran Desai:

"Is it really such a brave new world?" asks the novelist on a recent afternoon in Manhattan, her brow crinkling. "I don't know if anybody would say so right now, but when I look at globalization right now it seems like a very old story. And it seems pretty rotten."....
...Desai can relate to feeling trapped, however. She grew up in Delhi when that town felt cut off from the world.
"There was the feeling that books were the only thing that led you to the world," she says. "You read really hard; that was the only thing you could do."

And Jayaditya Gupta reads The Inheritance of Loss and sets off on a pilgrimage to Kalimpong, the small town in the hills that he remembers as well as Desai does:

I knew I shouldn’t have read the book. It was a trip I didn’t have the time for just then, a trip that, once started, would (and did) take me down many different roads. But when you gotta go, you gotta go, and so I went, courtesy Kiran Desai, back to Kalimpong, where I’d spent at least one holiday every year...
The best chronicler of Kalimpong’s ghost stories was the raconteur and illustrator Desmond Doig, and one of his stories dealt with Mr and Mrs Dench and their undying (literally) love for each other. The house they lived (live?) in is now occupied by Desai’s aunt; a handsome structure, stone facade, glass-and-iron front door, dark wood floors, wonderful smoky kitchen. Mr Dench died first; his food was left on the table, waiting for him. Mrs Dench descended into ill health and dementia and the nuns took her away. Yet they linger; voices have been heard where there are no people.
The spirits have been malicious—scratching and slapping—and benevolent, waking up an ayah when the fireplace had got blocked and the room, where she was sleeping with the family’s children, was full of carbon monoxide. They are part of the dark underside of a town like Kalimpong, as much as the ethnic mix and caste structure that would, from time to time, rip apart the lace-and-fineness in particularly bloodthirsty fashion. A couple of centuries ago it was the scene of bloody wars between the hill tribes. Indeed the house Desai’s parents bought was the scene of a massacre a couple of centuries ago.

Royal Runaround

2006-09-26T11:21:00.000+05:30

Kishore Singh, if you don't know the byline, is something like the Galahad Threepwood of India--generations of Rajput royalty have shuddered at the idea that he might finish writing his memoirs/ history of Rajasthan. He has all the gossip on the season's most interesting book about commoners and kings:

What’s getting everyone’s knickers in a twist now is Javier Moro’s book (Passion India, Full Circle, Rs 295) about the Spanish commoner who married the sophisticated Francophile Maharaja Jagatjit Singh of Kapurthala....
[Anita] Delgado, who came to India with visions of leading a gay life with a man she didn’t really love, or love enough (thinking him some “Moorish prince”), learnt soon enough that her position as his fifth wife, a commoner and a foreigner was far removed from their giddy courtship in Madrid and Paris.
She was rejected by the women of the zenana and by the status conscious British, and in the absence of friends to spend her days with, she resigned herself to luxurious isolation till, seeking companionship elsewhere, she seduced or was seduced by her stepson, Karamjit, the maharaja’s favourite son from his fourth wife, Rani Kanari.
The maharaja was persuaded by Mohammad Ali Jinnah not to make the affair public. Eventually, Delgado was exiled with an extremely handsome settlement, and went on to lead a luxurious (and not entirely lonely) life in Paris.

Vikram Seth leads fight for gay rights

2006-09-18T20:29:00.000+05:30

"There should be no discrimination in India on the grounds of sexual orientation. In the name of humanity and our Constitution, this cruel and discriminatory law should be struck down." (signed Vikram Seth, Swami Agnivesh, Soli Sorabjee and over a hundred prominent Indians).
Section 377, in case you didn't know, is a 145-year-old law that effectively criminalises gay relationships. Prof Amartya Sen calls the law "a colonial-era monstrosity"; the Delhi High Court will rule on Section 377 next month. Earlier this year, in January, Seth was blunt, calling the law "barbaric". His voice should make a difference; he's one of the most respected writers from the country.

And I still like this relatively early Seth poem:

Dubious

Some men like Jack and some like Jill
I'm glad I like them both but still
I wonder if this freewheeling
Really is an enlightened thing,
Or is its greater scope a sign
Of deviance from some party line?
In the strict ranks of Gay and Straight
What is my status: Stray? Or Great?

The WTF Booker shortlist

2006-09-14T22:31:00.000+05:30

No, really. I'm thrilled that The Inheritance of Loss, Kiran Desai's second novel, made it to this year's Booker shortlist--but what a shortlist it is. M J Hyland and Hisham Matar weren't available in India up until this week, and I've only just started Edward St Aubyn's Mother's Milk. Kate Grenville, Kiran Desai, Sarah Waters--all three have strong novels. I can understand dissing Peter Carey and Nadine Gordimer at a pinch, but David Mitchell didn't make it? And what, no Claire Messud?? But then again, I've been looking forward to Hyland's novel--and Matar can write. So perhaps this year's Booker judges actually read their way through the slush pile for a change...

Booker Prize 2006: shortlist

Kiran Desai, The Inheritance of Loss (Hamish Hamilton)
Kate Grenville, The Secret River (Canongate)
M J Hyland, Carry Me Down (Canongate)
Hisham Matar, In the Country of Men (Viking)
Edward St Aubyn, Mother's Milk (Picador)
Sarah Waters, The Night Watch (Virago)

Quick update:

--The Guardian on Kiran Desai going from "virtual unknown" (really? The Inheritance of Loss got strongly positive reviews when it was released a few months ago) to "potential Booker winner". "The first book took four years to write, the next eight, so I guess the third will take 16," she says, with a wry smile. "Then it will soon be time to retire."
--Peter Carey may not have made it, but the Aussies aren't complaining.
--Boyd Tonkins pulls out every blasted racing metaphor--heavily-backed steeds falling at the first fence, also-rans, the publisher's gallop on a separate track--so that you don't have to. Not that I blame him, something about The Booker sends every one of us hack writers off to the Racing Form for inspiration.
--The Times wonders why David Mitchell didn't make it.

The Gospel by the bushel

2006-09-09T13:06:00.000+05:30

I never thought you could quantify missionary zeal, but apparently you can:

According to this news story, Hodges Ministries has 1.6 million pounds worth of Christian literature--tracts, Bibles, pamphlets, psalms etc--waiting to be exported. "For instance, a 40-foot shipping container was to go out this week to India, where Christians number 2.3 percent of the population.... In 2005, the mostly volunteer work force sent nearly 1.2 million pounds of Bibles and other Christian materials to dozens of countries."