It can be quite refreshing, reading a review of a book written years after the book itself came out--the Babu is reminded that the culture of the instant review does us no favours. Tim Walker looks at Sir Vidia's Shadow from a refreshingly different perspective: "To me, there can be something vaguely pornographic about digging into the private life of writers; indeed, I think there is often something auto-pornographic or masturbatory about writers writing about writers."

The Hype--from the days of Mark Twain and Charles Dickens (if you're mentioning Rowling and hype, it's obligatory to bring in Dickens these days) to you-know-who.

"To a cynical observer, the Emergency would seem no more than a mini-publishing industry," writes Ashok Malik in the Indian Express before locking horns with Bipan Chandra's new book on the days when democracy died in India.

An anthologist gets his (copy)rights: Penguin has to back down in the case everyone thought Stuart Silverstein would lose.

P Sainath on Indian troops in Iraq in the past and now: "[During World War I] they died for the British empire. Now, they're being asked to die for the American empire. Then, it could be argued, we were a colony — and had no choice. Today, in the era of globalised markets, we'll be doing it for 'lucrative contracts." From The Hindu.

"Yet, although our stomachs turn at the prospect, we must sample the gruel Lewis offers, taste it, and analyze it, if only to identify the toxins that it contains and that have poisoned far too many Western minds for more than fifty years." M Shahid Alam's magisterial dismissal of Bernard Lewis' The Making of Islam. (See posts for June 12 for Sidhartha Deb's review.)

* "When it comes to issues like race, fudging the past can be an injury to the future." Laura Miller on the N-word and why not to let today's political correctness seep into yesterday's history.

More on Uzma Aslam Khan (see post for June 18): a link to her April article, What America Says Does Not Go, and a review of Trespassing from Outlook.

"Flaubert only has to mention in passing a book he might have dipped into for Bruneau to give a succinct and pertinent summary of it. You begin with words and you end up with a world." Julian Barnes pays tribute to the late Jean Bruneau, the man who made the compilation of Flaubert's correspondence the worthy task of a lifetime.

The war of words over the NCERT textbooks (see posts for June 03, 16 and 18) may have obscured other aspects of the government's policy on education. Recently, Murali Manohar Joshi set up the Bharat Shiksha Kosh, a centralised repository for donations to educational institutions in India--in other words, no more direct funding, and the government decides where the donor's money will go. Anil Dharker's column in The Hindu alerts us to the dangers of having an "activist" minister: "If you were a Desh Deshpande or a Vinod Khosla or a Vinod Gupta, would you be pleased? Would you not like to decide exactly where your money goes and for what specific purpose? Would you be happy if that money were to go instead into a Government administered fund whose destination you didn't know and whose administration you would be highly suspicious about? What would you do in that case? Sit tight, I imagine, and zip up your wallet."

Houellebecq is back. Andrew Riemer demonstrates the art of the back-handed compliment: "[Lanzarote is] a slight, though fascinating, work of a kind which, with another writer, might never have been translated."

The Asia Times reviews Bernard Henri-Levy's Who Killed Daniel Pearl? The reviewer is mildly sceptical: "The truth about his death may be much less heroic and more pedestrian than BHL claims. If we analyze what happened from a journalistic point of view, Pearl may have been merely a victim of media wars - of information treated as merchandise." (The Observer ran a profile of Bernard Henri-Levy recently--link found on Arts and Letters Daily: "He is rarely referred to by his full name, and is known instead as a brand: BHL."

The author of The Bride Stripped Bare, Nikki Gemmell, isn't spouting the usual line about the book not being remotely autobiographical. Just don't mention taxi drivers or orgasms in front of her husband.

Tim Wu has an interesting perspective on international copyright laws, using Harry Potter and the many knock-offs as an example. "The English original is clearly the best. The imitators aren't as good but are cheaper and come out much more frequently (there are already three Tanya Grotter books). There is, in short, a secondary Potter market. Isn't this the international trading system at its best?"

Squawk box: Children's author Alan Davidson is suing the makers of Chicken Run for plagiarising the film from his book, Escape From Cold Ditch.

"Good Faith was written out of rage." Jane Smiley on her new book in the LA Times, and in Identity Theory.

Blake Morrison on Big Books--the ones that need an XL label.

Any Indian novelist who's been called "Rushdie's heir" (and believe me, that's half the bunch!) will sympathise with the new generation of Asian-American novelists, who face questions like this: "Amy Tan has already written the Asian American experience. Why should we hire you?"

"Around three o’clock on Saturday afternoon, I raised my eyes in despair from somewhere in the middle of the book, and thought with shame and intensity, ‘Jesus, I’m reading a book about sodding pixies.’" Unlike other Potter-trashers, Philip Hensher nails Rowling for the most basic sin of them all--bad writing of an order that would have shocked Richard Adams, J R R Tolkien, and let's not even mention E B White. (Hensher never says a word about the inventiveness of Rowling's world, which appears to be the key lure for adult readers, however, though he indicates that the sloppiness of her prose is a complete disqualifier in itself.)

The nominees for the public's list of the 50 worst reads are in at The Independent. From Herman Melville to J K Rowling, Elias Canetti to James Joyce, somebody out there hates them. A special thank you to Andrew Brown for calling Paulo Coelho to account: "For a noble plant to finish up as a lump of coincidence-ridden, idiotic claptrap masquerading as deep thought is truly unnecessarily tragic."

"The author went through that added effort, there was that personal connexion, a give and take of the book. It doesn't seem right that it should be for sale, deeply discounted, in some dusty used bookstore. And the book should mean a little more, at least to the dedicatee." M A Orthofer at The Complete Review discovers firsthand what happens to some dedicated copies. The Babu seems to remember that it was when V S Naipaul disposed of one of Paul Theroux's signed works in similar fashion that the trouble started between those two.

Has "not for nothing" become the new "by the way"?

Trendspotting: Math is the new pink.

You can't compare Margaret Atwood to cilantro. Philip Marchand won't like it.

Ol' Blue Eyes--now that Frank Sinatra's no longer with us, Hillary Clinton wants his nickname. The Onion recently infographed her memoir.

"Moi is gone, Ngugi said, but Kenya needs to be wary of Moism, a condition in which the state is seen as a vehicle for looting the nation, in which ethnic hatred is promoted and national initiatives are crushed." For the first time in twenty years, author in exile Ngugi Wa Thiongo may be able to go home.

Leon Uris is dead, and the Babu's got new wrinkles just thinking about it. He's old enough to remember an era when people actually declaimed passages from Exodus in elocution contests (hell, the Babu's old enough to remember the fading institution of the elecution contest--the object of which was to make a bunch of Indians sound like a cross between Bertie Wooster and some idiot at the BBC, instead of which we ended up sounding like the offspring of a mating between Peter Sellers and Monty Python circus members). "Mr. Uris's fiction, including about a dozen novels, was more admired for the research that went into it and for its compulsively readable storytelling than for its depth of characterization or literary depth," notes the * New York Times.

Right Hand, Left Hand by Chris McManus has won the Aventis. "We want to know why it is that most people are one way - but there is this minority that's the other way round. We think it has to be because there's an advantage to being left-handed. We think they're a bit more creative - a bit more unusual. We say right-handers are 'off-the-peg' and left-handers are 'designer'." McManus has twin daughters: one is right-handed, like him; the other is a leftie.

The required reading list for Orwell appears to have shrunk to 1984, the selected essays and Animal Farm. The Babu suggests revisiting The Complete Works and rediscovering his novels. Looking for Orwell Lite? Take the quiz, compare Orwell and Huxley, Bill Gates indulges in a spot of classic Doublespeak, or read Jay Dubashi on Orwell (the burden of his piece is that he met the man, knew the man, dined with the man and has little intention unfortunately of telling you anything about the man).

If you intend to read just one article on Orwell and his vision of the future, let it be William Gibson's The Road to Oceania. "Orwell's projections come from the era of information broadcasting, and are not applicable to our own. Had Orwell been able to equip Big Brother with all the tools of artificial intelligence, he would still have been writing from an older paradigm, and the result could never have described our situation today, nor suggested where we might be heading." This is light years from the usual balderdash about how Orwell's 1984 was--ha, ha--nothing at all like the year 1984.

Orwell would have been amused at the idea that his 100th birthday could trigger such a flood of Orwelliana (the Babu intends to throw his Orwell party in 2084). The Washington Post made the obvious comment: "Orwell has suffered the famous author's ultimate fate: He is revered and invoked more than he is read." Orwell as contemporary saint is an old idea, and as with all saints, his halo is in danger of being tarnished. Did he betray "crypto-communists and fellow travellers" shortly before he died? (The Babu likes the "tubercolosis makes you go crazy" defence, but thinks he should point out that Orwell upheld the politics of the Left as against its practitioners, and came out with the odd sweeping statement to the effect that all communists were spies.)

Kitabkhana learned only recently that Hima Raza, a young Pakistani poet, died on May 29 after a car accident. The Babu had hoped to meet Hima Raza and Uzma Aslam Khan, who were supposed to come to Delhi earlier this year for a literary conference--but India's passport office, in an act of spectacular pettiness, denied the two their visas. The Dawn carried a tribute to Hima Raza.

"Hindi-Chini bhai-bhai/ Cheap Chinese toys, bye-bye." Vajpayee isn't writing a poem for China, after all, though the local media hasn't lost all hope yet.

Jennie Bristow, lips pursed in disapproval, launches a strong but often confused assault not just on the marketing of Harry Potter but on the books themselves: if you enjoy Rowling's saga, you're suffering from cultural infantilism. Don't blame her, she's just doing her bit: the laws of Potter criticism in the media specifies that to every three raves there must be at least one rant.

Target: Akbar the Great. When the Sangh Parivar decides to mess with history, they go all the way.

"...Lowell, like Yeats and Milton and very few others, left behind the monumental narrative of a career, which may well, curiously enough, be remembered longer than any single poem he wrote." Slate on Robert Lowell and whether the poet was fated to be "more read about than read".

Time's film critic, Richard Corliss, has seen the light: it's schlocky, addictive, garish and can be found at Naghma House.

The Orwell glut shows no signs of abating. "'Orwellian' phrases are up there with 'Dickensian' alleyways and 'Proustian' moments, possibly ahead of 'Kafkaesque' nightmares," comments Stefan Collini en passant, while * Geoffrey Nunnberg explains why "Orwellian" is such a misused word.

Hell hath no fury like a reader whose grammar is scorned, discovers Russell Smith. The Babu agreed heartily and made other encouraging noises all the way up to the final paragraph, where he was brought up short. He has trouble envisioning speakers who pronounces "nuclear" correctly or who rescues a participle from dangling as "wildflowers in a threatened ecosystem". There has to be a phrase for what happens when the mind comes up against a metaphor and crashes faster than a Microsoft product--how about "metaphorical blight"?

* James Buchan reviews Bunker 13 in The New York Times, somewhat equivocally: "Indian writers in English have managed to revive other literary forms that had long since run out of steam in Europe and North America. It may well be that even the superannuated and lachrymose spy thriller will have a new day in the Indian sun."

Ramachandra Guha pens an elegant rejoinder to Mihir Bose's The New Indian Caste Taboo. He is dignified: "It is all rather sad, and unnecessary. For in truth there is room for Bose's book and mine, and for many others too." He is also devastating--with some justice, given the provocation: "I have never claimed any of my works is 'comprehensive'. Important, yes, perhaps even pioneering. But claims to comprehensiveness I leave to Bose, who seems to think that when he has had his say on a subject, there is no need for anyone else to touch on it at all." The Babu thinks Guha did a pretty civilised job of savaging.

Oh, and here are two pieces that encapsulate the running debate over The Hype and the allergic reaction to The Hype.

The Babu's been bunking in order to read the new Harry Potter, which in his opinion should be marketed like a brand of coffee: it's stronger and darker than the previous four novels, and like the Babu's favourite coffee, unfortunately, requires some straining on the part of the reader if you intend to get through all 800-odd pages. Rowling's still playing around with names--a new character is called Umbridge, which is what everyone else takes to her--but the writing is more workmanlike, more tired and more cliched in Potter 5 than ever before. None of which prevented the Babu from enjoying his weekend Potternalia. There are already over 900-odd entries on Google News for Harry Potter, so all I'm going to post are these review links...Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix in The Guardian, again and again...in * The New York Times...the "first kids' review" from The Sunday Herald (what, they embargoed everyone under a certain height from doing reviews?)...and the Kansas Star explains with due solemnity how they manage to get reviews out so fast.

Simran Bhargava issues an urgent warning: "There's a conspiracy afoot...to take the Indian out of our English."

Has sex writing come of age in India, asks Raksha Shetty. The Babu is as interested in anyone as the answer, but is tired of pointing out that there's a difference between erotic writing and sex writing. Erotic writing is the stuff that makes you want to slide under the sheets with a like-minded sexual athlete; sex writing could be anything from 1) musings on gender b) dissertations on chromosomes c) hardcore porn. The Babu gives a thumbs-up to Shetty's comments on selected passages, though: nice work if you can get it.

* "Meaker remembers an acquaintance at a dinner party enquiring politely: 'You two young women live together alone?' Pat replied: 'We two young women live together together.'" Marijane Meaker talks to The Telegraph about her relationship with Patricia Highsmith, author of the Ripley books.

Precious Ramotswe is the Miss Marple of Botswana. (The Babu, an innocent in these matters, is fast beginning to realise that the only kind of story the media likes better than the one about the rags-to-riches debut author is the one about the unexpected word-of-mouth success.)

R Raj Rao's novel, The Boyfriend, falls into the category of books that the Babu praises for their good intentions, and deplores for their near-total lack of craft. The BBC sees the book as a watershed of sorts for the gay community in Bombay. So did the Babu, though Raj Rao's insistence on comparing the male anatomy to everything from chillies to carrots to cucumbers reminded him forcibly of Andrew Marvell's line: "..my vegetable love doth grow..."

"Democracies have traditionally defined themselves by, among other things - openness and the rule of law. But now it seems that we in the west are tacitly legitimising the methods of the darker human past, upgraded technologically and sanctified to our own uses, of course. For the sake of freedom, freedom must be renounced. To move us towards the improved world - the utopia we're promised - dystopia must first hold sway." Margaret Atwood on reading Orwell in the 21st century.

Oprah has spoken! The Book Club is back, it's going to focus on "classics", and her first pick is John Steinbeck's East of Eden. Here's what Neal Pollack has to say about it.

Harry Potter and the Leaky Embargo: A Canadian fan gets to read her copy of Harry Potter and the Golden Phoenix days before the rest of us, as do a few kids in Indianopolis... J K Rowling sues New York's Daily News for giving away part of the plot (they got their copy at a health food store)... Oh, and Rowling burst into tears when she killed off a major character. (The Babu is now officially sick to death of the whole Harry Potter thing. All he wants to do is read the goddamn book in peace, and try not to think of the hideous fact that we will go through the same old roller-coaster ride at least twice more, when numbers 6 and 7 come out.)

The Believer asked a bunch of writers what we might find on their desks. Zadie Smith has schoolwork; Rick Moody has blood (his own) on the brickwork; Glen David Gold has, among other things, a 16-pound tortoiseshell cat named Batgirl; Meghan Daum has the "seeds of both a second novel and a sesame bagel".

Uzma Aslam Khan tells The Independent about Trespassing, the "absolute silence" she met with in America during the Gulf War, and why she likes being on the fringe.

"Let there be a lie detector test!" Hell hath no fury like a historian scorned; the NCERT textbooks controversies just keep coming out of that cupboard.

Larry McMurtry on a recent biography of Lew Wasserman: "'Power' is a word often on the lips of Hollywood folk. So-and-so is said to wield 'enormous' power, possibly even 'unrivaled' power. It's usually not true." BTW, the NYRB July 3 issue is up: check out the list of contents. (Articles will be available for free online only for a short period.)

"I write when there's a void but you end up being prophetic. By writing the imaginary, you write the future: what was not happening in Chile, South Africa, the Czech Republic, but was going to happen." Ariel Dorfman, profiled in The Guardian by Maya Jaggi.

It was a hot and airless night and the power failed on cue just as the Babu was about to write the worst sentence ever typed in the history of peoplekind. The deadline for the Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest is June 30: this is your chance to go down in history with the likes of Snoopy and company.

"The tyranny of representation - the phrase is not mine but belongs, I think, to CLR James - means that when I speak, my brown skin is the dominant signifier." Monica Ali on representation, inspiration and of course the perspiration that goes into a book. (Oh, and can we please stop calling her the next Zadie Smith?)

* Guess who's been going to Green Gables? Hordes of Japanese tourists, inspired by the orphan girl who captured the hearts of readers...well, a very, very long time ago.

Potter Purloined!

Interesting discussion over at Two Blowhards about writing a book, and why you should lie down, take two aspirins and wait until the urge passes instead. Reminds me a bit of Barbara Kingsolver's stern dictum: "We are nothing if we can't respect our readers. It's audacious, really, to send a new piece of writing out into the world (which already contains Middlemarch) asking readers to sit down, shut up, ignore kids or work or whatever important irons they have in the fire and listen instead to me. Not just for a minute but for hours, days. Whatever I've got to say had better be important, worth every minute you're giving it, with interest."

Mihir Bose accuses Ramachandra Guha's friends of not playing with a straight bat, Indian publishing of unimaginative captaincy, and explains why his book on cricket should be seen as a genuine, bonafide history. (See also post for June 9, 2003, where Boria Majumdar disses both Guha and Bose with admirable economy.)

Dave Eggers wants you to call him just plain Dave. One of these days, he may even aspire to the heights of Prince, and be known as "the author formerly known as Dave".

"Zakaria warns against the hijacking of democracy by the rich and fanatics, and stresses the need 'to make democracy safe for the world'. But he segregates the ills of 'democratic capitalism' from capitalism itself, believing that well-intentioned elites can stay the decline of public institutions." It's great to have Dilip Simeon lending his voice to the mainstream again.

"Flying cars for all and no dishwashing for anyone!" Manjula Padmanabhan looks forward to an anti-slavery, equal rights propelled Potter world.

The Babu has given up trying to spell poppadum--should it be poppadum, pappadum, or the name by which he buys and eats the stuff, ie papad? Anyway, it's now been immortalised in print. Read all about The Punjabi Pappadum, complete with stereotypes.

"There will be no better book published this year." David Davidar uses "better" in a very limited sense indeed to explain why A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson is the answer to our prayers.

Perhaps this is a pleasure that will not linger past the 21st century--the discovery of an author's notebooks, chance letters and other paraphernalia might actually be more difficult in the age of email and the Delete button. Doris Lessing, going through Virginia Woolf's recently rediscovered notebooks, warns us what to expect, and tells us what we will not find. "Posterity, it seems, has to soften and make respectable, smooth and polish, unable to see that the rough, the raw, the discordant, may be the source and nurse of creativity. It was inevitable that Woolf would end up as a genteel lady of letters, though I don't think any of us could have believed she would be played by a young, beautiful, fashionable girl who never smiles, whose permanent frown shows how many deep and difficult thoughts she is having. Good God! the woman enjoyed life when she wasn't ill; liked parties, her friends, picnics, excursions, jaunts. How we do love female victims; oh, how we do love them."

Speaking of soap operas, the latest twist in the textbook controversy is pretty hilarious. The textbooks approved by the Left in India tend to gloss over the excesses of men like Stalin, Lenin and Mao: the new NCERT textbooks tell the story of the purges, the famines and the rest in grim detail. This is not being done, though, out of any great regard for the sanctity of history--the saga ends with the pious reminder that "communism had no chance against the will of a people who had rediscovered themselves through religion”. The Babu doesn't think that the omissions of one ideology are rendered any more palatable by the excesses of another. Neither does The Telegraph, if you go by the editorial that followed the story.

Bhaumick versus Bradford: Remember Karisma, the soap that was supposed to have borrrowed rather too freely from Barbara Taylor Bradford's A Woman Of Substance? Well, Sachin Bhaumick, who scripted Karisma, claims that Bradford doesn't come into it at all, and that he based it on his own work, a story called Aparajita. He's counter-suing.

Department of Corrections, part two: "In any event, we are victims of Newton's law of thermo-dynamics..." (second-last paragraph): Ashok Mitra comments on history and reinvents the history of science in his column, Cutting Corners, which appears in The Telegraph, Kolkata. The Babu, who approaches Mr Mitra's writings with the greatest of respect, notes that on a previous occasion, he had cause to refer to the deeds of the "famous US President", Frederick Delano Roosevelt. Perhaps all those sub-editors Andre Beteille groused about (see post for 9th June, 2003) might find suitable employment fact-checking Mr Mitra's august prose.

Department of Corrections: Perhaps it's an indication of how rattled the NYT was by the Jason Blair thing. Or perhaps it's a sign from heaven telling us that literature and baseball were never meant to meet.

"The road map, in fact, is not a plan for peace so much as a plan for pacification: it is about putting an end to Palestine as a problem." Edward Said on the future of the Middle East.

The end may be nigh--but not, argues John Sutherland, for Armageddon fiction. (Is it just the Babu's imagination or have recent LRB essays begun sounding more like energetically defended theses than long, leisurely arguments unspooled in front of an audience of discerning readers?)

"The language that could be a national language would precisely not be a native one, but the language of the conqueror, of the colonial era. Just because it is alien, foreign, it can become the unifying language of a diverse people: the only language that all Indians might have in common not only is, it has to be, English." Susan Sontag in the TLS on questions of translation and, yes, "The World as India". Counterarguments, anyone?

Posy Simmonds on the truth lurking behind the glamorous facade of the Publisher's Reader. (The Babu, who has held down many grunt jobs in the course of the sordid business of earning a living, is now doubly grateful he has never had to sink that far.)

Michael Dirda on Sonia Orwell, "the girl from the Fiction Department'.

Biblio's just updated its website--the January-February 2003 issue is now officially online. (Yeah, the Babu knows it's June; you know it's June; but do they know it's June?) Highlights: a special section on 'Image-Makers', featuring the work of Raghubir Singh, Raghu Rai and Samar S Jodha, a conversation between Susan Visvanathan and Dayanita Singh, and an essay by Sunil Khilnani on Benaras. Go get your fix.

Kitabkhana commented a while back that perhaps the coincidences between Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code and Lewis Perdue's Daughter of God weren't striking enough to prove that Brown was a plagiarist.

Dan Brown has denied reading Perdue's book, let alone copying from it, and the case is as complex as you'd expect when it's an issue of plot rather than line-by-line copying involved. Lewis Perdue writes in to Kitabkhana: "The similarities are more extensive than most think. Like many things in life, things by themselves don't tell the truth they do when viewed in context." Here's an article from the Chicago Sun-Times, and here's a link from Perdue's website. The fight's spilled over to Amazon's pages: on Dan Brown's Da Vinci page, 14 readers currently recommend Daughter of God instead of the Da Vinci Code. The Babu notes that many readers have pointed out spelling errors and errors of historical fact in the Code; it would be interesting to see whether the same errors show up in Daughter of God.

Statutory Warning: High Saccharine Content. (Good for you anyway, Anasuya Sengupta.) Hillary's sold a lot of books...but a panel of professionals for The New York Observer has useful tips to offer. John Updike: "Her citizenship is ardent." Erica Jong: "How pathetic that she has to twang our heartstrings in this cheesy way." Laura Moore: "We need to feel your pain."

Harry Potter to the Rescue!

The celebrated author of Zabiba and the King must be lamenting the fate of his next work, Get Out Of Here, Curse You!. That's the US Army for you: first they stand by while the Library of Korans burns down, then they ruin Saddam's book launch.

Whenever Indrajit Hazra hears the word "culture", he reaches for his bottle of Aqua Ptychotis.

*"He's the intellectual equivalent of the lone gunslinger"--the Babu recognises that as a fair description of Christopher Hitchens. But the last time he read praise of this order--"He's attractive in a fleshy, rakish sort of way and each puff of smoke and glug of wine seems to shout 'danger'"--was when the Babu was browsing Russell Crowe's fansite. It's a nice line, though, especially if Hitch is contemplating taking out a Yahoo! Personals ad.

Pushkin pips Pepys to the Johnson. Always wanted to write a tabloid headline like that.

Pottermania has reached its zenith. Or its nadir. The Babu says tut-tut.

The myths that gather around the Men Who Ruled India. According to this New Yorker review of Curzon by David Gilmour: "[Curzon] never did, it seems, marvel at the whiteness of the skin of the working classes, upon seeing soldiers bathing near Armentières in the Great War; nor, on exiting his club and finding himself without a cab, did he summon an omnibus and order the driver to take him home. He did try to silence the chimes of Big Ben, on the ground that they disturbed his sleep, and he complained that the red carpet rolled out to greet him in Calcutta when he became Viceroy was 'the size of a postage stamp'." At the WSJ, Andrew Roberts describes Curzon's reign as Viceroy in terms that almost raised tears of nostalgia for the days of Empire (how good it was, how noble, and never forget, they brought us benighted Orientals the railways, and mulligatawny soup): "He was the most talented colonial administrator of an empire teeming with them, guided by an altruism of motive that seems almost otherworldly to us today. He brought peace and prosperity to a continent, yet his viceroyalty ended in dejection and bitterness."

"I'd like to have an old person too, but I haven't managed to find my 70-year-old debut yet," says Deborah Treisman, commenting on the three young writers who feature in the New Yorker's Debut Fiction department. The Babu extends an open invitation to Ms Treisman to come to India; he has just returned from a visit to his "native place", ie Calcutta, which appears to be populated by retirees intent on committing their memories to deathless prose. She can even have the manuscripts they pressed on him. Really.

"If Islam is today the favorite subject of these old colonial paradigms, it is because both Islamic fundamentalists and Western commentators like Lewis have reduced the diversity of Muslim cultures and societies into a single imaginary specter whose principal characteristic is an antimodern allegiance to the principle of jihad against infidels, apostates, and heretics." Siddhartha Deb neatly dismantles The Crisis of Islam by Bernard Lewis. The Babu will merely note that while one must never judge a book by its cover, it is sometimes tempting to judge it by the subhead, which, in this case, is Holy War and Unholy Terror.

Here we go again. Indians who write in that Indian language referred to as a non-regional, non-vernacular...the Babu gives up--okay, Indians Writhing in Ingliss. (He doesn't have his spellcheck on today.) Anyway, all of you out there who hold Indian passports and happen to write in English, know ye that ye write for the outside world and for marketing reasons. The otherwise astute U R Ananthamurthy is the latest in a long line of writers to say so, presumably because they're just as sick of being referred to as bhasha writers as the IWE school is of being called by an acronym that sounds like it belongs to Yewie, son of Chewbacca.

Alisa Valdez-Rodrigues wrote a 3,400-word resignation letter, quit the LA Times, threatened to write a novel--and several broke months later, came out with a reasonable advance for The Dirty Girls Social Club. This story has a happy ending, and it's told in the Miami Herald. Not the LA Times.

At 62, Paul Theroux looks like a mix between Tommy Lee Jones, W H Auden and Clark Kent, says the Guardian. The Babu, contemplating such a blend of features, is rendered speechless.

The romantic world of the freelance writer: no boss, no dress code, and as James Sallis notes in the Boston Globe, no health insurance, sometimes no income and often no respect. (There's no way around it, says the Babu, the more you attempt to get away from the stereotype of the writer starving in a garret, the more it boomerangs back. Not everyone's a retired First Lady with an $8 million advance, after all.)

* Michiko Kakutani pronounces judgement on Hillary Clinton's Living History: "Overall the book has the overprocessed taste of a stump speech, the calculated polish of a string of anecdotes to be delivered on a television chat show." The Independent informs us breathlessly that her fans are "hungry and legion". (The Babu mentally updates the Bible: "My name is now Hungry N. Legion.") In Slate, Jen Bluestein attempts to defend the curious institution of the publisher's embargo, while Neil Pollack stomps on both the idea of the embargo and on the erstwhile First Lady. USA Today suggests that to embargo a book may be equivalent to throwing down a gauntlet: "...no one is denying that embargoed books by high-profile people are to journalists what chum is to sharks." And the Babu concludes that it's all a question of semantics: one person's embargo is another person's scoop.

"Silence, then, like darkness, carries something important about who the authorities want others to be, something important about the nature of authority itself, and the way it wants to dehumanise others in the silence." Hanif Kureishi on modern methods of censorship. (The Guardian left out the graf marks, making this an unwittingly tedious read.)

James and the Giant Cherry and the wondrously politically incorrect Charlie's Chocolate Boy. Early drafts of Roald Dahl's children's fiction have been found.

Ram Guha and Ashok Desai have a connection of sorts--SS Bengallee. And don't look for the Next Page button, there isn't one: that is the final paragraph, unless serious editorial mayhem behind the scenes is to blame.

Until June 21, when the queues for Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix will compose half of humanity (or so we're told), this is the choice hapless scribes have: to do a Marketing of Harry Potter story, or a How Harry Was Marketed story. The Guardian, doing its bit, reminds us that what we're seeing today isn't half bad given that the book's first print run was a thousand copies.

Boria Majumdar is working on a history of the great game-cricket, not espionage-for the BCCI. The young scholar has set his sights fairly high: he hopes to outdo Mihir Bose and Ramachandra Guha, two of the great chroniclers of the game in India. More on the game: Ashok Malik takes issue with the thesis that Ranji was a "scheming defender of princely privilege", an anti-nationalist who just happened to be a wizard with the bat.

Ranjit Hoskote on the trials and tribulations of the poet in India: "The real problem with Indian poetry in English is its precarious relationship with its own acknowledged audience. Unlike the audiences that sustain the Hindi and Marathi kavi sammelan or the Urdu mehfil, to name only three of the vital interfaces between poets and audiences in India, the audience for English in India does not truly bring a shared and consensual understanding to bear on the poetry it receives." Call him a philistine, but the Babu has wearily waded through far too much derivative and self-indulgent slop masquerading as poetry in search of a few stray gems to have much patience with this argument.

"Gandhi once said of Indian Opinion that 'week after week I poured out my soul in columns expounding my principles and practices of Satyagraha... The journal became for me a training in self-restraint, and for friends a medium through which to keep in touch with my thoughts'." Ramachandra Guha in The Hindu on Gandhi the journalist.

Cannibals, widow-burners, headhunters--and copy-editors. Andre Beteille has suffered in silence in the hands of inept subs long enough; now he trains his sociologist's magnifying glass on the tribe.

There are prizes for everything at children's parties these days, so that, a mother explained to the Babu, no one will feel left out. Apply the same principle to the literary world, and what you have is an equivalent bunch of lollipops, including the newly launched Royal Society of Literature's £10,000 Ondaatje prize. This will go to "the book of the highest literary merit--fiction or non fiction--that evokes the spirit of a place". The Babu suggests a simplified way to look after the interests of struggling authors: institute a worldwide movement for a Feed-A -Writer Day.

The Babu is puzzled. He understands why film enthusiasts might protest against Bollywood being used to denote the entire Indian film industry, but why blame the Oxford English Dictionary for including the term at all?

"Aftab is like a polyester shirt and falls into place without creases.." Reading this review of We Weren't Lovers Like That from the Indian Express, the Babu remained undecided over whether he wanted to read an entire novel built around the travails of a polyester shirt. His mind was made up for him by Indrajit Hazra in the Hindustan Times, who defined the book neatly: "We are firmly in Indian Middle-Class Angst Central."

"Don't accept any dinner invitations--this is the sort of book that you will read without budging from the sofa, grunting at anyone who tries to make conversation." Vikram Chandra, author of The Srinagar Conspiracy, sets his seal of approval on Aniruddha Bahal's Bunker 13.

Jane Austen's fiction "persists in working on critical imaginations as challenge, irritant and equivocal comfort". Bharat Tandon in the Times Literary Supplement on updating Aunt Jane.

"It was quite an ordinary pen..." Why Tenzing Norgay carried a blue ballpoint pen all the way up to the summit of Mount Everest.

John Keay's Sowing the Wind is out. Philip Hensher reviews it in The Spectator, from a very British point of view.

Anthony Julius defends his stance on T S Eliot's anti-semitic poetry: "Refusing either to acquiesce in, or to rail at, Eliot's contempt for Jews, one strives to do justice to the many injustices Eliot does to Jews. This is what adversarial reading allows. It is an alternative to two kinds of silence: the coercive silence of censorship, the passive silence of the submissive reader. It combines resistance with respect."

Made up stories for the New York Times? Murdered your cousin? Or maybe you're just an ordinary celebrity, or a star police chief. The Washington Post checks out The Vig's client list.

Another round of updating the Oxford English Dictionary yields bling-bling, orcs, phreaking and (about time too) search engines. As the OED celebrates its 75th anniversary, The Telegraph explains why it will always remain a work in progress.

Deconstructing Salam Pax. Takes the meatspace world quite a while to catch up with the virtual, doesn't it?

It was the best of lines, it was the worst of lines. The Independent has an identify-the-opening-line challenge. The Babu composed Opening Line Poetry as he went along: "It was love at first sight/ We're twins/ I write this sitting in the kitchen sink/ Last night I went to Manderley again/ The primroses are over."

In the future, we will see...the paperless office. Again. Robert Fulford on why dead trees are still in demand.

"Is there any stronger evidence of our reading culture's anhedonia that Thomas Berger's novels don't flood airport bookstalls?" Jonathan Lethem on a rare writer--a man who might even deserve to have that cliche--"one of the greatest living novelists"--slung around his neck. (The Babu's thanks to the erudite reader who pointed him in the direction of Lethem and the Voice Literary Supplement.)

Bengal offers a Lal Salaam--finally--to English.

The sanctity of the publisher's embargo is the focus of debate after Associated Press leaked passages from Hillary Clinton's book. As The Times points out, if the point of an embargo and the farming out of exclusive extracts is to generate publicity for an author, the AP leak served the purpose just as well. The Babu thinks that the value of an exclusive extract is limited in the age of the Interrnet anyway.

The Babu has no idea who the mish-mish man is, but according to UK High Court Judge Lewison, he can schizzle his nizzle as much as he wants.

"I'm searching for the essence of a culture I love and, in the city of its birth, I find that hip-hop is everywhere. But nowhere, too." The Guardian has an extract from new fiction by Patrick Neate. (Loved his Twelve Bar Blues.)

Heads have rolled at the New York Times in the wake of the Jason Blair plagiarism scandal. NYT publisher Arthur Sulzberger sent out a staff memo this morning.

Who moved her cheese--Pasha and the Henchrats? Manjula Padmanabhan--author, columnist, illustrator, NameReader (ask her!) and playwright--is back with Mouse Attack. Her name has been economically pared down on Amazon UK to Manjula Padman.

"One odd part of a writing parent is that they don't die in the same fashion as everyone else...The flesh rots and leaves behind the words." Janna Malamud Smith in The Threepenny Review on her father Bernard Malamud. (Link found on Arts and Letters Daily.)

Edge introduces a new books page. If you're looking for a reason to read it, cast an eye over the list of participants: Richard Dawkins, Simon Baron-Cohen, Charles Seife, Andy Clark, Peter Galison, Clifford A. Pickover, William Poundstone, John Allen Paulos, Matt Ridley, Mihaly Csikszentmihaly, Karl Sabbagh, Richard Nisbett, Martin Rees, Steven Strogatz, Daniel C. Dennett, George Johnson, Nicholas Humphrey, John D. Barrow, John Horgan, Dylan Evans, Bruce Sterling, Keith Devlin, Scott Atran, Steven R. Quartz &Terrence J. Sejnowski, Howard Rheingold, Steven Pinker, Martin E. P. Seligman, Timothy Taylor, David G. Myers, Oliver Morton, Gino Segre, Robert Aunger, Lynn Margulis & Dorion Sagan, Albert-Lászlo Barabási, Michael Sherrmer, Gerd Gigerenzer, John Brockman, William H Calvin, Tom Standage, Janna Levin, George B. Dyson, Rodney Brooks, Paul Davies, Joseph LeDoux, John McWhorter. Convinced?

The Orange Prize for Fiction has gone to Valerie Martin for Property. The judges took five hours to come to a decision. Clare Armistead comments. Interesting that most of the media thought that the prize would go to an 'A-list author'; whatever happened to the concept of an 'A-list book'?

Sagarika Ghose on bad versus good westernisation and the Call-Centre Drawl. (The Babu ran through a mental checklist of the components of good Westernisation and came to the conclusion that he is neither well nor poorly westernised. However, if there's a category for spaghetti westernisation, he probably fits right in.)

A President's best friend...Hillary Clinton describes the atmosphere that prevailed after Bill told her and Chelsea about his affair with White House intern Monica Lewinsky: "Buddy, the dog, came along to keep Bill company. He was the only member of the family who was still willing to." WorldNet Daily asks whether Hillary's book will bomb. And the Montreal Gazette wonders who she picked as ghostwriter this time.

Julian Barnes on how to handle the thoroughly modern nightmare of the dinner party.

More on plagiarism: Brian Van deMark, who teaches at the US Naval Academy, is discovering the hard way that the old saw--"it's not plagiarism if you steal from many authors"--isn't necessarily true.

Alex Beam's column in the Boston Globe follows up on accusations of plagiarism against Barry Unsworth. The way the novelist sees it, a few passages from his research notes crept in to Losing Nelson. The way historian James Charles Roy sees it, Unsworth ripped him off, at least in part. The issue feeds into a deeper area of concern: exactly how accountable should historians or historical novelists be? (No one doubts that Unsworth's imagination is original, but he certainly could have made a better apology.) On the other hand, is it really possible to write a history or a decent historical novel that doesn't piggyback on someone else's research?

A play called A Map of the World is showing in the Bay Area. It has three main characters in the inspiring setting of a UN conference on poverty--a leftwing British journalist, a delegate from Senegal who represents the voice of the Third World, and "an arrogant, opinionated, conservative Indian writer (who some see as a thinly disguised V S Naipaul)". It gets more and more preposterous: the play also offers a love angle, and a visit to a movie set. The Babu swears he didn't make this up.

The interview that interviews itself: the Melbourne Age meets a media-weary, media-wary Jonathan Franzen. The Babu feels for them both. A close cousin of this sort of interview is the bikini interview, as illustrated by the Rediff take on Aniruddha Bahal--one that appears to cover all the main points, while concealing everything of any importance.

Who cares who killed Roger Ackroyd? Pradeep Sebastian does, and explains why.

Arundhati Roy is now an acknowledged icon for the protestors converging in Switzerland and France to register their rejection of G-8; her writings provide the oxygen they need. (The Babu warns against calling her a "poster girl" for the movement; he hears from singed interviewers that Roy objects to the phrase, and quite correctly too.) Outlook has posted the transcript of her May 12 talk with Democracy Now. All eight pages worth.

Just how numerically illiterate does The Guardian think its readers are? This report claims that Philip Pullman has outdone J K Rowling in terms of UK sales figures. Take a closer look at the fine print: Pullman's His Dark Materials trilogy, as in all three books combined, outsells any individual Potter book. The Babu plans to set his team of fierce, Dobermanesque backroom beancounters on the staff member who wrote this.

The Babu isn't sure whether the "coincidences" between Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code and Lewis Purdue's Daughter of God are striking enough to be called plagiarism: this could be just the classic nightmare where two authors stumble on the same ideas. Read the article and decide for yourself; or better yet, read the books and take a call.

"One finds a number of curious stories being peddled to schoolchildren: Aryans sallying out from India to settle Iran, Homer adapting 'The Iliad from the Ramayana, Christ roaming the Himalayas in search of Hindu wisdom. These claims will sound unlikely even to the hardened Indophile, but they are being promoted in government-sponsored textbooks, columns by right-wing journalists, and paintings commissioned to adorn public spaces." Siddhartha Deb weighs in on the rewriting of India.

Perhaps poets are best met in poems, says Uma Mahadevan-Dasgupta, reviewing Eunice de Souza's second foray into fiction. De Souza may be miffed at the general opinion of her prose, but she may be consoled by the knowledge that her poetry is reckoned far superior. She will never rank among the egomaniacs or paranoid amateurs whose poetic effusions Barney McClelland deplores.

As usual, the Babu will be forced to mete and dole links to The Hindu's Literary Review in order to make the issue stretch over an entire month. He can't resist pointing you in the direction of this essay by Amitava Kumar: "When history has been turned to ashes, what remains in its place is Disney...Were there no readers in the army of victors?"

The Babu plans to spend his weekend catching up with the New York Times list of essential summer reading. It's classic NYT: predictable but inoffensive.

To do is to bee, to bee is to do, and the Babu bets you anything you like that Sai Gunturi is humming the punch line ("Do bee do bee do") after winning the 2003 Spelling Bee. Here's a list of champions and their winning words, and if you want to know what they mean, the official site has a consolidated word list.