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Books Archive
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The White Tiger Redux
Posted on October 20, 2008 | 20 CommentsMeera 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... -
When an Award is not Just an Award
Posted on October 16, 2008 | 23 CommentsIn 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... -
Reexamining False Heroes
Posted on September 19, 2008 | 5 CommentsI 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”... -
Spare the Comics, Dammit!
Posted on August 19, 2008 | 11 CommentsIt 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... -
Academic Terrorists
Posted on August 10, 2008 | 10 CommentsGoes 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... -
Who Wrote This?
Posted on April 13, 2008 | 14 CommentsThe 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... -
Ramanujan’s Ramayana
Posted on March 15, 2008 | 73 CommentsThe 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... -
Book Review: Exodus
Posted on December 31, 2007 | 10 CommentsWhen 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... -
Book Review: Autobiography of a Yogi
Posted on August 22, 2007 | 10 CommentsMy 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. Tweet -
60 Years of Deceit and Misgovernance
Posted on August 12, 2007 | 18 CommentsShashi 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,... -
Theatre of the Absurd
Posted on August 11, 2007 | 18 CommentsOur cops seem to be eager to perfectly fit the mould that Bollywood/Indian cinema has set for them. The Hyderabad police have registered a case against controversial Bangladeshi writer Taslima Nasreen, who was recently attacked by workers of Majlis Ittehadul Muslimeen (MIM) in Hyderabad, for... -
Book Review: AAVARANA
Posted on June 14, 2007 | 185 CommentsAavarana is a book Indian secular intellectuals love to hate but cannot ignore. The “average reader” (which increasingly means someone endowed with commonsense, a healthy sense of balance, and has not mortgaged brains at the ideological altar) chose to respond differently. In the miniscule market...