Pico Iyer, recipient of a sex change operation? Nah, he's merely adopting the authorial voice of the female gender for his next book, says Kaushik Mitter in The Asian Age. The Babu feels mildly cheated; Pica Iyer has quite a ring to it. (NB: The Asian Age uses frames, so if you can't locate the story, go to the home page at www.asianage.com and either search for "Pico Iyer" or check in the righthand column for today's news.)
The Indian Express has a brief article on Iyer as well, who told a sizeable audience at his book reading in Delhi about the fire that devastated his home a few years ago. Iyer described the flames shooting up in his living room, and the call he made to his editor the next day to tell him that the books he had planned to write were now on hold, since his research notes and early drafts had been reduced to ashes. "That's wonderful!" was his editor's response. Now that the decks had been so ruthlessly cleared, he told Pico, the author was free to work on what was really important to him. It took a while, Iyer said wryly, before he managed to see the worth of that response.