Meera beautifully weighs in with an open letter to Aravind Adiga. It proves one my pet-peeve theories that the biggest intellectual celebrity is also the one with zero commonsense.
I have read much about how you came to write this book. You have been quoted as saying,” So, where’s this Shining India everyone’s talking about? It [...]
In the beginning of an essay on contemporary literary criticism, S.L. Bhyrappa dissects a Kannada short story, entitled Rotti (a dish made of rice flour) and cites numerous similar stories written in that vein. He observes that the story, like U.R. Anantha Murthy’s novel, Bharatipura is merely a filler of a pre-set pattern, a template. [...]
I know Nehru’s legacy as a person, patriot, freedom fighter, and Prime Minister has been examined to death. By both his admirers and arch-critics. In the Indian landscape of the history-political books, the Nehru-as-God books severely outnumber those that critically examine him. The “critical editions” are mostly not subject to review. For example, a book [...]
It takes tremendous amounts of grotesque perversity to detect ulterior, sinister motives behind producing children’s comics. That’s perhaps why it takes only a Tehelka to do the job. Their target is the Amar Chitra Katha series of comics that educated millions of children mostly about India’s history and mythology. ACK is a case study of [...]
Goes by the name of Denise Spellberg.
Starting in 2002, Spokane, Wash., journalist Sherry Jones toiled weekends on a racy historical novel about Aisha, the young wife of the prophet Muhammad. Ms. Jones learned Arabic, studied scholarly works about Aisha’s life, and came to admire her protagonist as a woman of courage. When Random House [...]
The Mohammadan conquest with its propagandist work and later the Christian missionary movement attempted to shake the stability of Hindu society and in an age deeply conscious of instability, authority naturally became the rock on which alone it seemed that social safety and ethical order could be reared. The Hindu, in face of the [...]
The old suspect, A.K. Ramanujan emerges out of the woodwork on Outlook’s pages. The magazine’s leader to this article says:
…in a pocket of the Delhi University, right-wing student activists have taken exception to this essay by the celebrated scholar A.K. Ramanujan, on the many Ramayanas living across languages and narrative genres, each different but no [...]
When it was first published, Exodus deservedly became an instant bestseller. In a brief period after its publication, it was translated into 50 languages. It remains an enduring, classic saga of the Jews, who as the book shows, "return home." That Leon Uris has poured passion into the book is apparent on every page.Exodus is [...]
My circle of friends is as large and varied as the interests, hobbies and passions of each person in that circle. There’s no one, absolutely no one there who hasn’t heard of or read the classic Autobiography of a Yogi.
Shashi Tharoor is a delightful novelist. I loved his Riot not just for its unique experiment in structure and form but for the author’s skillful treatment of a delicate subject.
I wish Tharoor displays a bit of that in his columns and sundry articles. Sadly, he doesn’t. Blame it on his St. Stephen’s pedigree. I suspect [...]
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