Pulp fiction from India

More middle brow than low brow, and not as noir-ish as American pulp fiction, the stories in the The Blaft Anthology of Tamil Pulp Fiction represent what is popular today in Tamil writing. Pradip Sebastian in The Hindu:

The cover was half Anandha Viketan, half Quentin Tarantino: a bespectacled girl in a sari carrying a gun. TAMIL PULP FICTION it read in orange-yellow bold. And, above it, in smaller font: The Blaft Anthology of -‘. Blaft? Who or what was blaft? It was odd to see that particular cover illustration - which I was more used to seeing in Tamil weekly magazines - on a book cover. You can’t miss it in bookstores; its striking cover beckons at you from the shelves. On closer inspection, it turns out to be the first anthology of Tamil pulp fiction to be translated into English. Selected and translated by Pritham Chakravarthy and edited by Rakesh Khanna, it features 17 tales of crime, romance, science fiction, and detective stories. This was certainly good news: I had always wanted to find out what Tamil pulp read like, and Blaft, a new, independent publishing house in Chennai, had magically conjured up just such a book to fulfil the wishes of several pulp addicts like me. Blaft figured it was high time these stories were made available in English.

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So where is Bin Laden, anyway?

Bin Laden family biographer Steve Coll ponders several questions about Osama Bin Laden’s location.

Indian Summer: story of the Mountbattens

Drama, glamour and performance: Alex von Tunzelmann’s book about the Mountbattens is made for film. From The Sunday Times:

Had Dickie Mountbatten lived long enough to read Alex von Tunzelmann’s Indian Summer - a lively history of India’s partition in 1947, in which, as last viceroy, he plays a central role - a few details might have irked him. Her portrayal of his early naval career as a catalogue of catastrophic blunders, for instance, might have grated. The open discussion of Nehru’s affair with Mountbatten’s wife, Edwina, would likewise have offended his sense of decorum. One thing about Indian Summer, however, would have thrilled him: the book is to become a film. Even better, Hugh Grant is rumoured to be playing Dickie and Cate Blanchett his wife.

Mountbatten loved the movies. He and Edwina, always a handsome couple, even appeared in one during their honeymoon of 1922: Nice and Easy, starring Charlie Chaplin. Mountbatten’s life, moreover, was a constant performance. He loved the pomp and ceremony of officialdom, and in particular the brilliant white uniforms it allowed him to strut about it in. Indeed, so inherently cinematic were the lives and loves of the Mountbattens that their friend Noël Coward based the leads in In Which We Serve and Brief Encounter on them - the latter picture prompting the viceroy to exclaim “how deeply it moved me”.

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A conversation with Salman Rushdie

Mountain baby

When doctors told Jane Wilson-Howarth her baby needed major surgery, she feared his life would not be worth living. So she left behind the consultants, the needles, the tests and took him far away to live among the ’sane, baby-loving’ people of Nepal. From The Guardian:

At the next river - the biggest so far - we drove down the bank and plunged in. Clear water surged on to the bonnet and over the windscreen of the Land Cruiser. Three-and-a-half-year-old Alexander whooped with delight and his excitement made little David chuckle. With water churning up to the windows, the river was intimidatingly wide, but it was exciting and exquisite too. At the far bank, we drove up on to a pristine beach. Panicking chickens scattered between thatched huts as we passed under an arch of sprightly bougainvillaea, and pulled up in the courtyard of an imposing two-storey house.

Within minutes of arriving at our new home on Rajapur island, Simon, my husband, was whisked away to meet local farmers. As the incoming water expert, he was expected to offer wise solutions to problems that rival landowners had been squabbling over for generations. He stayed frenetically busy, but the boys and I had the luxury of time: time to explore. Alexander took rides with his special friend the Tractor Man and learned how to feed a new calf. Meanwhile, I could sit with David, soaking up the reviving winter sunshine. He was more peaceful than I had ever known. He was content, and for now, at least, away from life-support machines and probes and drips.

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Karachi calling

When novelist Mohammed Hanif told friends he was returning to Pakistan after 12 years in Britain, they were aghast. Why would he and his young family swap London for a city with daily power cuts and rampant gun crime? The answer proved surprisingly simple … From The Guardian:

Twelve years ago, I arrived in London from Karachi with eight suitcases, a new wife and a three-year job contract. Before leaving for London, we had put our books, furniture and even some of our kitchen utensils at our relatives’ houses. When I told my friends and family that we would be back after exactly three years, they gave us a knowing smile and encouraged us to sell that sofa instead of putting it in their store room.

Two months from now, we are planning to return to Karachi with a container full of furniture, more pots and pans than we left behind and a 10-year-old son. Friends and family in Pakistan are aghast. From London to Karachi? Why are you coming to Karachi? Do you know what happened to Sana’s friend the other day? Do you have any idea how you’ll live without electricity for 10 hours every day? And, by the way, have you discussed this with Channan? How does he feel about it?

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Cosmic cuisine

Curry in the great scheme of things. A review of Lizzie Collingham’s “Curry, A Tale of Cooks and Conquerors” by Robert Eric Frykenberg:

Seated cross-legged on a grass mat spread upon the cool, smooth stone floor of a traditional Brahman house, we waited as aromatic basmati (”Brahman”) rice was doled out onto each stainless-steel plate. Tiny stainless-steel bowls of curry (dhal, sambar, rassam, vegetable, etc.), curd, chutney, and other delightful dishes followed. Only the fingers of one’s scrubbed right hand could touch the food. Our hosts hastened to make sure that each dish was constantly full. Yet they themselves ingested nothing, lest strictest protocols of purity be violated. “SNR” (S. N. Ramaswamy) was a strict Sri Vaishnava of the Tengalai (Southern) School. With a university degree in engineering and a high position in the largest motor transport firm of South India, he was an authority on automotive history-and an ardent admirer of the late John F. Kennedy. He also visited the huge temple complex of Sri Venkateshwara at Tirupati once each month to have his head shaved (hair being gifted to the deity), and scrupulously bathed in the Triplicane temple each morning before ever touching food. And, when he ate, he ate alone, accepting food and drink only from the hand of his beloved wife (or daughter), neither of whom ate until he had been fed. His mouth received food and drink without ever coming into direct contact with fingers, utensil, or vessel. His family ate what was left after he was fed. The family never ate together; nor were meals an occasion for sharing. Eating in any “public” place was unthinkable-restaurants were a modern invention and “polluting.” Indeed, while in my house for avid scholarly discussions, his hand never strayed close to the chai and biscuits I invariably placed before him. Cosmic purity of birth required no less. Pollution brought cosmic ruin. He could only take leftovers, ritually pure food, offered to the deity. His wife could take food left by him (her deity). We could receive food “given” or offered us. This was part of the hierarchy of prasadam: grace.

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Change and loss

Coming from India to the US, Jhumpa Lahiri tells The Guardian’s Christopher Tayler about the intense pressure she feels ‘to be loyal to the old world and fluent in the new.’

Until fairly recently, Jhumpa Lahiri didn’t have much name recognition in this country. But in the US, where she grew up and lives, and in India, where her parents were born, she’s had star status since the beginning of her career. Her first story collection, Interpreter of Maladies (1999), which she finished not long after turning 30, won a string of awards that culminated in the Pulitzer prize for fiction. Her first novel, The Namesake (2003), was also well received and became a US bestseller; a less well received film of it by Mira Nair was released in 2006. Her marriage in Calcutta in 2001 to Alberto Vourvoulias-Bush, a Guatemalan-American journalist, was given Hollywood-scale coverage by the local media, complete with paparazzi shots. And - unusually, to say the least, for a serious piece of writing, let alone a story collection - her new book, Unaccustomed Earth, went straight to the top of the New York Times fiction bestseller list.

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India, literature and culture

In The Telegraph, UK, Ivan Hewett reviews Clearing a Space by Amit Chaudhuri:

He values the novelist R K Narayan because in his fictional town of Malgudi “he presents a small India of material desires and ambitions, and gently mocks the transcendentalism of… the Orientalists’ vision of India with its grand spiritual heritage”.

There’s a sweet earnestness about Chaudhuri’s tone that strikes a charmingly old-fashioned note, though he hasn’t entirely resisted the infection of jargon terms from post-colonial theory such as “subaltern” and “binaries”.

He can be trenchant, castigating the Hinduism pedalled by the Bharatiya Janata Party as “kitsch”, and saying it has embraced capitalism “a little too well”. And he’s not too high minded to give a proper “close reading” to Bollywood. He points out that the way it uses locations from Windsor Castle to California as backdrops for songs mirrors “strangely but compellingly, the world of conspicuous excess and extreme poverty we now live in”.

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The truth will set you free

In Hindustan Times, a review of Indrajit Hazra’s The Bioscope Man:

The Bioscope Man is set in the Calcutta of early 20th century However, echoes of what is happening on the other coast in Bombay keep intruding into the margins of the story of the rise and fall of his protagonist.

Two years after Dadasaheb Phalke made the first full length feature film in India, Raja Harishchandra, in 1917, a Bengali film, Bilwamangal, produced under the banner of Madan Theatres, was screened in Calcutta. Harishchandra S. Bharvadekhar, a still photographer and dealer in equipment in Bombay was the first to make a film (two , brief films, in fact) in India in the late 19th century And not too long after, in 1901, Hiralal Sen set up Royal Bioscope in Calcutta to make films: he photographed dance sequences and scenes from plays being staged at Classic Theatres. (‘Bioscope’ is the name of an early film projector for splashing moving images on a screen. It became the generic name for cinema after the American Charles Urban - producer of the world’s first successful natural colour motion picture system, Kinemacolor, as Hazra mentions in his book - popularised it.)

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October 8, 1950 …

… a moonlit night in Colombo, a Sinhalese girl, a Tamil boy and a secret love which would cut them off from their families and cast them into exile. Until now. Their daughter, Roma Tearne, explains what happened next. From The Guardian:

My mother was born in Sri Lanka on March 18 1920. Seventy-five troubled years later, in the early hours of a September morning in 1995, I received a phone call from a London hospital informing me of her death. Until that dawn call that changed everything forever, I had not imagined life without her. She had gone to bed as usual the night before, but suffered a massive heart attack.

Later that morning, I went back to the house and found her orange court shoes, turned inwards towards each other. They were left exactly as she had stepped out of them for the last time.

[Bone China by Roma Tearne is published by HarperCollins]

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Professor finds the art in both numbers and letters

Manil Suri, 48, is by day a professor of mathematics at the University of Maryland Baltimore County. By night, he is a novelist, creating narratives set in his native India. From The New York Times:

Q. Have there been many mathematician-novelists?

A. Lewis Carroll. He was sort of a mathematician. There are other people who’ve done something similar. Apostolos Doxiadis wrote “Uncle Petros and Goldbach’s Conjecture,” and he was a mathematician. There’s someone in Argentina who wrote a short novella on Gödel’s incompleteness theorem. So there’s a sprinkling of them. But it’s not like medicine, where there’s a tradition of literary doctors. Mathematics and literature, they seem divergent fields. In mathematics you have a lot of constraints, whereas in literature, you can make your story come out the way you’d like it to.

Q. Are there areas where math and writing converge?

A. Actually, there are a few. If you’re writing and plotting the path of your characters, you have to consider the different directions they might go. “If I move something there, what will happen with this other thing?” Or, “How will the characters interact, if they do this or that?”

In mathematics, in place of characters, you have variables or unknowns. If I’m trying to plot a theorem, I try to imagine these variables interacting with each other. The boundary of their interaction is the theorem.

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The power of the powerless

In The new York Times, a review of Justin Wintle’s “A Life of Aung San Suu Kyi, Burma’s Prisoner of Conscience“

There are not many countries whose stories are so intensely bound to the character of a single person, much less a person with no tangible power, not even the power to leave her house or receive a visitor or make a telephone call. Yet for nearly two decades, events in Myanmar (formerly Burma) have revolved around the condition, the policies and most of all the victimization of Daw Aung San Suu Kyi, now 62, who has been held under house arrest for 12 of the past 18 years. Hers is a symbiotic power, as Justin Wintle describes it in his aptly titled “Perfect Hostage,” bestowed by the almost cartoonish thugs who have made her “an outstanding example of the power of the powerless,” in the words of the former Czech president Vaclav Havel.

[Photo: Protestors in London with masks of Daw Aung San Suu Kyi, 2007.]

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India: The place of sex

William Dalrymple in The New York Review of Books:

You can still get a flavor of the intoxicatingly rich and sophisticated classical India that supplied these luxuries at the once-great port of Mamallapuram on the Coromandal coast. Here massive relief sculptures faced onto the port where, according to a seventh-century poet, “ships rode at anchor, bent to the point of breaking, laden as they were with wealth, with big-trunked elephants, and with mountains of gems of nine varieties.” The reliefs cover one side of a hill: at the right are two huge elephants, trunks swinging; nearby, warrior heroes and meditating sages stand below flights of gods and goddesses, godlings, nymphs, and tree spirits. There is a breezy lightness of touch at work: a flute is playing, there is dancing, and the heavenly apsara fertility spirits and goddesses are whispering fondly to their consorts.

The man who commissioned the sculptures was King Mahendra, a ruler of the Pallava dynasty who reigned from 590 to 630 AD. (The dynasty itself held power between the sixth and the eighth centuries.) Taking the titles Vicitracitta (The Curious Minded) and Mattavilasa (Drunk with Pleasure), Mahendra was an eclectic poet and playwright and an innovative aesthete and sensualist. He wrote two lost treatises on South Indian painting and music, and several plays-one of which, a cynical and sophisticated satirical farce called The Drunken Courtesan, tells the story of an alcoholic worshiper of Shiva and his courtesan-lover who get into an argument with a tipsy Buddhist monk over a drinking bowl left lying in front of a bar. The farce is still regularly performed in the south today.

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Robin Cook and his dangerous Indian beauties

Robin Cook (of Coma fame) is ready with his new thriller: Foreign Body. It’s about the dark side of medical tourism and “the action begins in New Delhi, India, where a mysterious hot nurse puts a mysterious injection into an older woman… The nurse works for cutthroat medical entrepreneurs.”

Michael Eisner is former chief of Disney during whose tenure the studio produced such hit films as Saturday Night Fever and Raiders of the Lost Ark.

According to a story on NPR’s All Things Considered, Cook told Eisner he has a book coming out in August about Americans going to India for cut-rate operations. “It was full of suspense, murder and sexy nurses,” and suggested “a series of videos that would be a prequel.”

Result? “A low-budget, quick-and-dirty web series” produced by Vuguru, Eisner’s year-old broadband production company. There are 50 episodes of two-minutes each.

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The making of the Foreign Body web series

From Los Angeles Times:

How do you go about telling a story in two-minute increments? Click here for how the series was made. [Photo: The filming of Foreign Body]

And the exotic thriller

From foreignbody.tv:

A group of dangerous Indian beauties, brimming with hope and desire are brought to the sunny shores of Southern California and are promised the American dream. They are taken in by a group of young, cutthroat medical entrepreneurs who hope to train them and cultivate their nursing skills for their own mysterious ends. The women soon become seduced by the brash and ambitious charmer who lords over them, but for him, his lust for the one, mysterious, unattainable beauty threatens to unravel the very conspiracy he built.

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And some more here and here

Confessions of a Poppy writer

In Hindustan Times, Amitav Ghosh goes behind the curtains of his latest novel, The Sea of Poppies, and talks about what led him to this epic tale of drug-running and sea-faring.

Near the beginning of Sea of Poppies, Deeti, the central character, has a vision of the Ibis, the schooner that will eventually carry her away from India. For me, too, the book began in much the same way - except that the vision that was revealed to me was of Deeti herself. I knew from the start that her story would be the main current of this novel; she would be the river that carried the weight of its many tributary streams.

One of the reasons why I was drawn to Deeti’s story is that my own ancestors set off on their travels at about the same time as she did: the difference was that they moved in the opposite direction. The founder of the family is said to have left his village in eastern Bengal in the early part of the 19th century. Moving gradually westwards, he came to a halt in 1856, when he settled in Chhapra, a small town in Bihar - the very place in which Deeti and Kalua come to their fateful decision to sever their links with the past and seek a new life overseas. It was this unnamed ancestor who led me into the story of opium by prompting me to wonder why he had ended up where he did. What led him to settle in this relatively obscure place? What opportunities could he have been seeking? This was then the world’s single most important poppy-growing region and was thus one of the chief sources of the wealth of the British Raj. Such opportunities as existed there must have been connected with opium in some way. Could it be that the star that ruled my family’s destiny - and thus my own - was the same as Deeti’s, that is to say, the seed of the poppy?

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Previously in AW: Lascars, sepoys and nautch girls

Sorry Mum, but I’ll marry who I want

In The Times, an extract from “If You Don’t Know Me By Now: A Memoir of Love, Secrets and Lies in Wolverhampton” by Sathnam Sanghera:

My dearest Mother,

There’s something important and difficult I’ve been meaning to tell you and because it’s easier to be brave on paper than in person, I thought I would do it by writing this, my first ever letter to you. But now I’m sat here, I wonder whether it’s such a good idea. The way I write English is different from the way I speak English, the way I speak English is different from the way I speak Punjabi, and like all mothers and sons, we have been conditioned into communicating with a certain degree of intimacy and distance, so it’s possible that you won’t even recognise my voice in this. But with no better options coming to mind, I will try to do what seems so difficult: stop worrying, trust my translator and hope for the best.

Anyway, as I said, I have something important to tell you, and it relates to the book I’ve been working on for the past 18 months. There were a great many reasons why I wanted to write it - to make sense of how Dad’s and Puli’s [his sister's] lives have been affected by their illness [schizophrenia], to attempt to rescue their experiences from oblivion - but one of the reasons I persisted even when it became very difficult was my desire to create some kind of tribute to you. I’ve always thought you were amazing, Mum. I know you must sometimes think I don’t listen when you complain about your ailments, but I know it was all those days at your sewing machine, to make sure that we were clothed and fed, that have left your body wracked with aches and pain, and I know I complain that you nag, but I understand that your phone calls and advice are just your way of saying you wish you saw more of me. But knowing now what you went through with Dad, and then again with Puli, that admiration has deepened.

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The Dalai Lama’s flight

In The Times, an exclusive extract from Alexander Norman’s new book [Holder of the White Lotus: The Lives of the Dalai Lama] recounts how the spiritual leader came to leave Tibet:

In October 1949, Mao Tse-tung’s Communist Party swept to power in China. One of Mao’s first announcements made clear that the “peaceful liberation” of Tibet would be a priority for the new regime.

By July 1950, the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) had advanced to within 100 miles of Chamdo, the capital of Kham (eastern Tibet). The first serious engagement between the two sides, at Dengo, was technically a victory for the Tibetans. But if the Chinese army in the area was only 20,000- strong - against the Tibetans’ 5,000 - a further 5m men under arms stood behind them. The eventual result was a foregone conclusion.

On October 5, the PLA launched a full-scale attack on Chamdo itself. Ngabo, the ineffectual aristocrat governor of Kham, sent several urgent telegrams to Lhasa [the Tibetan capital] requesting instructions. There was no reply. On 15 October, one of his aides de camp succeeded in contacting Lhasa by radio. He was told that although his telegrams had been received, they had yet to be decoded as the Kashag [government of ministers] was currently engaged in its annual week-long series of picnic parties. It was now clear that Ngabo faced the might of the PLA alone. Two days later, he was given permission to retreat. On 19 October, he was captured and all Kham fell into Chinese hands.

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Lascars, sepoys and nautch girls

In The Guardian, James Buchan reviews Sea of Poppies by Amitav Ghosh:

This terrific novel, the first volume in a projected trilogy, unfolds in north India and the Bay of Bengal in 1838 on the eve of the British attack on the Chinese ports known as the first opium war. In Sea of Poppies, Amitav Ghosh assembles from different corners of the world sailors, marines and passengers for the Ibis, a slaving schooner now converted to the transport of coolies and opium. In bringing his troupe of characters to Calcutta and into the open water, Ghosh provides the reader with all manner of stories, and equips himself with the personnel to man and navigate an old-fashioned literary three-decker.

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Imperial bedfellows

At commentarymagazine.com, a review of Arthur Herman’s Gandhi and Churchill: The Epic Rivalry That Destroyed an Empire and Forged Our Age:

Gandhi’s particular genius was to see how to weave together the two opposing strands in a manner that would appeal to Anglicized upper-class Indians and illiterate villagers alike. By 1927 he had managed to bring together in his Congress party Hindu nationalists, Bengali nationalists, Sikh separatists, old-line loyalists, and cutting-edge socialists. He also had the good fortune to launch his movement at a moment when, thanks to the devastation of World War I, Europeans were losing faith in their own civilization. The environment in London, Paris, and Berlin was ripe for new ideologies and styles of life, and was fascinated by non-Western cultures.

Gandhi was introduced to a wide reading public through the Nobel laureate Romain Rolland, who produced an adoring biography of him in 1924. Even more important, he was the first third-world politician to understand how to exploit and manipulate the credulity of Western media. As early as 1912, when he left South Africa for good, he ceased to wear British clothes, and was often photographed with his spinning wheel. For most of his life his diet consisted of fruits, nuts, and goat’s milk, a token of the saintly image he sought to convey. His famous “march to the sea” to protest the Raj’s salt tax was staged mainly for the benefit of newsreel cameras, which conveyed the images around the world.

To be sure, not everybody was impressed. Churchill, for one, regarded Gandhi as “a fanatic and an ascetic of the fakir type well known in the East”-a judgment not altogether true, but not altogether false, either.

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A biography of the world’s most famous sex manual

Michael Dirda reviews The Book of Love: The Story of the Kamasutra, James McConnachie (Metropolitan, 267 pp, $27.50) in The Washington Post [via 3QuarksDaily]

Years ago, a bunch of us were sitting around drinking when I heard a friend murmur two sentences I have never forgotten. “You know, guys, sex is the greatest thing in the world.” He paused and we were all about to nod in agreement. He was, after all, a noted and knowledgeable ladies’ man. Unexpectedly, though, he then added, with infinite wistfulness: “But it’s just not that great.”

There, in that gulf between the reality and the dream, lies the domain of pornography, the sex industry and the masturbatory fantasy — of Viagra and the midlife crisis. Our Western myths of love are seldom about fulfillment; they are all about yearning. In Plato’s Symposium we are told that the gods divided the original ball-like human beings in two, and that we consequently spend our lives searching for the other half who will complete us. So-called romantic love, which first blossomed in 12th-century France, revels in passion delayed, forbidden or otherwise thwarted. Its real theme is desire.

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On the record: Jeffrey Archer

Bestselling author Jeffrey Archer is a man of many parts — he was captain of the athletics team at Oxford, he ran for his country, and was a Conservative MP at 29. He wrote his first novel, Not a Penny More, Not a Penny Less, in 1976. Since then he has kept producing works that always topped the charts. His stint in jail for perjury saw him write a well-received prisoner’s diary, and, adapting the tales he was told by fellow prisoners, he put together a short-story collection called Cat O’ Nine Tails. Archer was recently in India to promote his latest book A Prisoner of Birth. In an interview with The Indian Express Editor-in-Chief Shekhar Gupta on NDTV 24×7’s Walk the Talk, he speaks about cricket, of which he is an avid fan, about politics in the UK, and about getting on in life without being in the dumps over the mistakes one makes.

Wonderful to have you here in a bookshop in Gurgaon, Landmark, in a mall.

Yes, which wouldn’t have been. When I first came to India 15 years ago, there wouldn’t have been a mall.

•You said you never came to India because you were never invited. You need an invite to come to India?

I thank Landmark very kindly. They said, ‘We would like to do a proper tour. We know you have been to India, but we would like to take you around the country because you’ve got a lot of fans here.’ And I said, ‘Well, I have seen the figures from the Kane & Abel days, which is 30 years ago. And they said, ‘Oh, they are buying more now that you are even more popular. So we would like you to come over.’ So I had just done Australia for the fifth time, and I had just done America for the seventh time.

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Rhyme and punishment

The greatest living poet and the greatest living writer in English (and each has a Nobel Prize to show for it) have made no secret of the fact that they absolutely loathe each other. Now St Lucia-based poet Derek Walcott fires his latest barb at bete noire, V.S. Naipaul in a stingingly funny poem, The Mongoose which premiered at a literary festival in Jamaica recently. (’I have been bitten, I must avoid infection/Or else I will be as dead as Naipaul’s fiction.’) Daniel Trilling has the story in The Observer

Well into their seventies and with a Nobel Prize apiece, they are the elder statesmen of world literature: one is acclaimed as the greatest living English-language poet, whose best-known work is a narrative epic, Omeros, based on Homer’s Odyssey; the other is a similarly fêted novelist and travel writer.

But last week the St Lucia poet Derek Walcott used his talent in the pursuit of less lofty ideals as he reignited a simmering row with VS Naipaul by unveiling a stinging attack on the author - in verse.

Walcott’s new poem, The Mongoose, is a fast-paced, savagely humorous demolition of Naipaul’s work and personality that begins with the opening salvo: ‘I have been bitten, I must avoid infection/Or else I’ll be as dead as Naipaul’s fiction.’ It was premiered at the Calabash Literary Festival in Jamaica.

Telling the audience, ‘I think you’ll recognise Mr Naipaul … I’m going to be nasty’, Walcott launched into The Mongoose amid a hubbub of surprised gasps and nervous laughter from the crowd.

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Confessions of an uncommon reader

Mohammed Hanif’s book, A Case of Exploding Mangoes is causing a stir in London. Here, blackly humorous, he writes of how he stumbled on books in a Pakistan military academy during General Zia’s regime. And escaped. [Excerpt in Tehelka]

Once upon a time, when I was 18, I found myself locked up in Pakistan’s military academy’s cell along with my friend and partner-in-crime Khalid. We had thought we were doing charity work but the Academy officers obviously didn’t share our ideals. We had been caught trying to help out another classmate pass his chemistry exam, something he had failed to do twice already and this was his last chance to save himself from being expelled. The logistics of our rescue effort involved a wireless set improvised in the Sunday Hobbies Club, a microphone concealed in a crepe bandage around the left elbow of our academically challenged friend, and a Sanyo FM radio receiver. We were running our operation from the rooftop of a building next to the examination hall. We were caught red-handed, whispering a reversible chemical equation into the transistor.

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But what would my Pakistani father say?

Yasmin Hai is an acclaimed journalist who has worked on BBC2’s Newsnight and Channel 4 documentaries. In a wonderfully honest new book, The Making Of Mr Hai’s Daughter, she describes the challenges of growing up as the daughter of Pakistani parents - and a father who yearned for her to be accepted as English. From The Daily Mail:

Grasping the door handle, I steadied myself against the walls of the moving railway carriage.

“Now!” my father called out. “Squeeze it hard, go on, squeeze it!”

Despite the urgency in his voice, I held back. The train didn’t look as if it had dropped enough speed for me to open the door.

Liberal upbringing: The teenage Yasmin went on marches with rainbow-painted hippies

The faces of the passengers standing on West Hampstead station platform were still fuzzy blurs.

“What are you waiting for?” my father shouted impatiently. “Come on, come on.”

This time, I clasped hold of the lock and with gentle pressure attempted to slide it to the right. Despite my clammy hands, it gave way.

I had done it - the train door was open! A small achievement, but for me, at the age of 11, a significant one.

This was the third day in a row that my family had made the train journey from our home in Wembley across London to Camden.

The mission: to familiarise me with the new school journey that I would be making from next Monday. Nothing could be left to chance.

[via 3quarksdaily]
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Tiger burning bright

A review of V. V. Ganeshananthan’s Love Marriage by Gail Tsukiyama in Ms. Magazine:

In spare, lyrical prose, V. V. Ganeshananthan’s debut novel tells the story of two Sri Lankan Tamil families over four generations who, despite civil war and displacement, are irrevocably joined by marriage and tradition. At the heart of the story is American-born Yalini, 22, the only child of Tamil immigrants. Her father eventually becomes a doctor, her mother a teacher; they make their new life in the United States. Even so, Yalini feels bound to “the laws of ancestry and society.”

Born during “Black July” of 1983, the beginning of the civil war between the Tamil and Sinhalese, Yalini is haunted by Sri Lanka’s political turmoil, caught between the political and social traditions of her ancestors and the modern world in which she lives. She can’t forget that in a Sri Lankan family there are only two ways to wed, in an Arranged Marriage or a Love Marriage, even though she knows that “in reality, there is a whole spectrum in between, but most of us spend years running away from the first toward the second.”

[via 3quarksdaily]

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Looking for Naipaul

Joseph Lelyveld reviews V.S. Naipaul’s A Writer’s People, in the New York Review of Books [via Powell's Books]

Thirty-two years ago, V.S. Naipaul went to India for this paper to write about the collapse of its post-independence experiment in democracy. Nehru’s daughter, Indira Gandhi, had declared an emergency and suspended the constitution. Naipaul took this to be a major turning point, and possibly a salutary one, for a sick culture in need of shock therapy. One of his articles explored the notion that Indians experience the world in ways drastically different from those of most Westerners: that Indians were typically more self-absorbed, less observant, more instinctive; in other words, that they were ill-adapted, in their basic consciousness, to the modern world. “India: A Defect of Vision” is what he called that essay.

Naipaul’s latest volume is a set of variations and meditations on that theme. One of its chapters is called “Looking and Not Seeing: The Indian Way,” but this time, in his characteristic preoccupation with what his subtitle terms “ways of looking and feeling,” he journeys far beyond the subcontinent. A Writer’s People is amazingly concise, as Naipaul can be, but also wide-ranging and tightly packed, a kind of literary Rubik’s Cube, made up of small, exquisitely beveled pieces, with no obvious points of contact, that he manages to fit together effortlessly. At one moment, we go from Nehru’s thoughts about Gandhi to the author’s mother and her experience on her first visit to their ancestral village. A few pages later, we’re into Flaubert and the embrace of concrete French realities that made possible the glorious, seemingly transparent second chapter of Madame Bovary, which then is contrasted to the overblown failure of Salammbo. By a natural progression that brings us to Polybius, only a couple of steps away from Virgil and, leaving the Aeneid aside, his poem “Moretum,” which Naipaul celebrates for its grasp of the physical details of life in this world. Then we’re back on the Gangetic Plain in 1925, observing the young Aldous Huxley observing Gandhi at a political gathering.

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‘Osama bin Laden is planning something for the US election’

US author Steve Coll spent years looking into Osama bin Laden’s family. Now, his new book, The Bin Ladens, provides a unique insight into the clan. SPIEGEL spoke with him about where the terrorist might be hiding, how his father got his start, and the unique romantic liaisons pursued by one of his brothers:

SPIEGEL: Where is bin Laden now?

Coll: I am firmly convinced that he is on Pakistani soil, and I would even venture to say where: in the mountainous region of North Waziristan, near the city of Miram Shah. Bin Laden knows the area like the back of his hand. It is controlled by the Haqqani clan, in which he has deep roots. Pakistan’s army doesn’t dare enter the region.

SPIEGEL: Do you think he’s in some sort of al-Qaida camp where he can play a role coordinating the group’s activities?

Coll: Osama probably moves from place to place, protected by friends — which doesn’t mean that someone won’t betray him one of these days. And he apparently has access to modern means of communication, like satellite TV. The Miram Shah region, unlike rural Afghanistan, is further developed in this respect than we in the West generally assume. I imagine that Ayman al-Zawahiri, his deputy, isn’t in the same place as bin Laden.

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‘Sixty is the new 40′

Author, designer, mother, wife, Shobhaa Dé has a way of challenging stereotypes and reinventing her persona. At 60, having just published her new book, Superstar India: From Incredible to Unstoppable, she says life is still full of possibilities. Suchitra Behal in The HIndu:

She feels women have a chameleon-like quality that allows them to adapt to any situation. It is perhaps this very quality that makes author, designer, mother, wife (not necessarily in that order), Shobhaa Dé change her roles ever so frequently. Like Madonna, Dé too has that something which makes her challenge stereotypes and reinvent her persona to do something that she wants to. “I refuse to be a kindly granny fading into oblivion. I want women to know that it is possible to live life at 60. Sixty, my dear, is the new 40,” says Dé, tossing her mane. Or, as Meryl Streep famously remarked in “The Devil Wears Prada”, ‘Everybody wants to be us’.

Known for her rather provocative style of writing, Dé who has so far written only fiction, much of it based on the glamour of Bollywood, has switched gear and written a book based on India and its 60 years. It is no coincidence that the book is being published in her 60th year too. “India and my journey has been together. I was born in an independent India and I want our young generation to invest in this country. That is my mission,” remarks Dé.

Click here to read excerpts from the interview:

Om Sweet Om

In The New York Times, a review of Deborah Baker’s “A Blue Hand: The Beats in India,” which follows Allen Ginsberg on his 15-month pilgrimage across India in 1962-63.

Somewhere along the line, biography picked up a reputation as autobiography’s sober, better behaved, law-abiding sibling. While first-person narrative has had well-publicized dalliances with make-believe, reporting on the lives of others is expected to pay strict attention to historical fact. Deborah Baker is already the author of two biographies, “Making a Farm: The Life of Robert Bly” and “In Extremis: The Life of Laura Riding,” which was a finalist for a Pulitzer Prize. For her new book, “A Blue Hand: The Beats in India,” she had the choice of sticking with the square’s way.

But how could she - or why would she - once she decided to compose a group portrait of Allen Ginsberg and his bliss-seeking crew during the poet’s 15-month spiritual quest (and bodily adventures) in the land of a zillion mystics early in the decade running from Kennedy through Nixon?

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Why Sir Salman cannot write a novel

Farrukh Dhondy in The Times of India:

The old Jewish joke asks “How do we know Jesus was a Jew?” Answer: “He entered his father’s profession, lived with his parents till in his thirties and believed his mother was a virgin.” Jesus himself said “By their works shall ye know them” or words to that effect and very recently while reading The Enchantress of Florence, the latest novel by Salman Rushdie, it occurred to me that this dictum can be used as the literary critical key to identity.

I confess that on the night before a Salman Rushdie book is to be published, I take my sleeping bag and camp outside the doors of some famous bookshop, much as travellers, in the era before Minister Laloo Yadav’s reforms, did at the ticket windows of our railway stations. That I am inevitably the only person in the overnight queue and inevitably questioned by the Phillistine London police, has never deterred me. After I’ve read the book I immediately look up all the reviews I can find to determine what I should think about it.

The reviews of The Enchantress prove that a massive delusion has been foisted on the literary world. From the Times Literary Supplement to the Indian press, the critics are all grievously mistaken, barking up the wrong tree. They are like people who go fishing, leaving behind lines and hooks, mounted instead on horses and running with hounds to horns. Wrong creature, mistaken pursuit.

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South Southeast: The journey of a lifetime

Steve McCurry has been visiting, travelling through and photographing South Asia for the past 20 years. In his new book, South Southeast (Phaidon Press, $59.95), he writes about what draws him back again, and again

Back in 1978, when I first left for India - really left with that young man’s, door-slamming sense of forever - I’d already been all over the world. But this time was different. This time I had slung over my shoulder the camera that I was determined would somehow pay for a serious case of wanderlust - wanderlust as the ancient traders had it, hauling the teas, dyes and spices that still stain the roads and permeate the air of the most colourful part of the world.

Years later, colour is still what takes me south-by-southeast to Asia - colour and life and light. The Buddha-, Shiva-, Allah-laden light of 1,000-year-old temples, the rain-like light of Burma and Cambodia, and the rocket-pulverized dust of Afghanistan where tribal wars continue to rage. Wherever you go in that part of the world, there is the riot of life carried out in the streets and bazaars. And, like the overpowering weather, there is religion that controls life with a force the West hasn’t known since the Renaissance.

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To enter the exhibit and see more photographs from McCurry’s book, South Southeast, click on the Cultures On The Edge website here

And, to order the book from Amazon, click here

 

Sir Salman: ‘We have been wimpish about defending our ideas’

In The Spectator, Salman Rushdie tells Matthew d’Ancona that the idea at the heart of his new novel set in 16th century Florence and India is that universal values exist and require robust champions

The last time I interviewed Salman Rushdie was, as he remarks, a lifetime ago. That was in February 1993, in a safe house in north London guarded by Special Branch officers, only four years after Ayatollah Khomeini sentenced him to death for the alleged blasphemy of The Satanic Verses. On that occasion, quite understandably, the novelist seemed shrunken: not only spiritually subdued, but physically compressed by the ordeal of the fatwa.

Fifteen years on, we meet in very different circumstances to discuss his new novel: The Enchantress of Florence, a lushly magnificent exploration of East and West in the 16th century. No longer creeping in the shadow of theocratic murder, Rushdie — or, more properly these days, Sir Salman — is animated and puckish. In a magic realist touch, it is as though the 60-year-old novelist is actually younger than he was in 1993. At any rate, his countenance and the spark in his eye today prove that you can come back from the dead.

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Previously in AW, Rushdie’s new novel and new love interest: click here, here, here and here.

Theroux on Naipaul

In the Sunday Times, Paul Theroux on his one-time mentor

Ten years ago I published Sir Vidia’s Shadow, depicting V S Naipaul as a grouch, a skinflint, tantrum-prone, with race on the brain. He was then, and continued to be, an excellent candidate for anger management classes, sensitivity training, psychotherapy, marriage guidance, grief counselling and driving lessons – none of which he pursued.

Now comes Patrick French’s authorised biography of the man, The World Is What It Is, which makes all these points and many more. It seems that I didn’t know the half of all the horrors.

When the lawyers were shown the type-script of my own book, they were all over me. “Look at this – ‘violent, unstable, depressive’ – Naipaul could prove malice!” And the trump card of the QC, with his lists of deletions and revisions: “Do you know what it will cost you if he sues you?”

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Previously in AW:

• That Naipaul book
• Two lives, two memoirs
• Sex, truth and Vidia
• Pride and prejudice

Asian power games

In The Sunday Times, Michael Sheridan reviews Rivals: How the Power Struggle Between China, India and Japan Will Shape Our Next Decade (Allen Lane, 20 pounds, 328 pp) by Bill Emmott, the former editor of the Economist

Economics may have shaped the Asia of today but politics are forging its tomorrow, says Bill Emmott, the former editor of The Economist, in a striking new book that predicts a dangerous power struggle between China, Japan and India.

Emmott’s book is already selling well in temples of globalisation such as Hong Kong airport, no doubt because it stands out among the heaps of corporate drivel in the duty-free bookshops. A “disruptive transformation” is in progress, says Emmott, who edited The Economist from 1993 to 2006. It generates wealth but could set off conflict, he fears, identifying the tangled boundaries of Tibet as one danger zone.

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