"But then in an age when everything's up for sale, why not icons? In an era when all of humanity, when every creature on God's earth, is trapped between the International Monetary Fund (IMF) cheque book and the American cruise missile, can icons stage a getaway?" From a radio speech by Arundhati Roy.

"What I wished I’d had the courage to do was to take the loud-hailer from one of the men shouting themselves hoarse and talk to the queue of the “Friends of the BJP”, talk to them in Gujarati, to ask them how their Gita-paath and prayers to Mataji jelled with gang-rape, to ask them which Hindu text gave them the licence to fund the butchering of small children, to say to them that, if they really believed in another janma, should they not be then terrified of the maha-paap they had just reaped?" Ruchir Joshi bears silent witness to the protests in London sparked off by Narendra Modi's visit.

The trade magazine reviews of Jhumpa Lahiri's The Namesake have been disappointing.

"Literature as an intellectual discipline has been downgraded to merely another 'realm of opinion' by dead white men whose insights are mere reflections of privilege rather than brilliance." From the Tallahassee Democrat.

"[Becket] told his biographer James Knowlson that his 'own way was in impoverishment, in lack of knowledge and taking away, in subtraction rather than adding'. He felt a keen affinity with others who did the same, such as the sculptor Pala, whose studio in the banlieue he once visited for hours, asking only, 'When did you begin reducing?'" The TLS on Beckett the man and on the critical industry that grew up around him. (Link found on Arts and Letters Daily.)

* Anne Lamott is republishing her third novel, Joe Jones--"which went on to do worse than any other book in history. I am not tooting my own horn -- I got such bad reviews that people pretended the book hadn't really even been published. I thought this book would end my career. Some reviewers even said they hoped I would get Ebola and bleed out and die -- or at any rate, that's what they said if you read between the lines."

Who Killed Daniel Pearl? provokes several layers of debate. Here's Emran Qureshi on the book: "In Lévy's estimation, the real enemy of the West was not Iraq, but Pakistan, and he hints that some "intervention" may be necessary. It is here, while considering the geopolitics of the subcontinent, that this study falters, as it demonstrates a marked inability to confront pathologies in the Indian subcontinent as a whole. Lévy warns that the odour of the apocalypse wafts from Islamabad to Karachi. No doubt it does, but it also drifts across the border from New Delhi to Islamabad. India has tested nuclear devices on its border with Pakistan and is governed by radical Hindu nationalist parties that mirror the prejudices of their neighbours. Hindu nationalist ideologues were also influenced by German fascist ideology. V..D. Savarkar, a noted Hindu nationalist ideologue, repeatedly compared Indian Muslims to German Jewry...All this eludes Lévy, who views India through a romanticized, saffron-tinted lens."

Banker's Ramayana elicits strong responses. Outlook's Letters page doesn't allow for permalinks, so I'm afraid you'll have to scroll down to locate a) reader's responses to Krishna Prasad's review b) Banker's response c) Krishna's rebuttal. It's worth the hassle.

"Droll, with its connotations of pathos, gallantry and humour in the face of adversity, is a word well-suited to the small, darkly dressed and markedly eccentric Lambs, with their hearts of gold and tongues dipped in vitriol." For years the Babu knew the Lambs only as the bowdlerisers of Shakespeare. It's good to have a different perspective.

"Like Marquez, also a working journalist, Jha takes the dregs of the day and turns it into more lasting prose. But while the Latin American writer has used magic realism to give epic form to the unwritten history of his nation, Jha’s ambitions are more personal and private. He writes of the tyranny of fathers and of the secrets held in silence within the walls of our bedrooms.
The result is not always spectacular." Amitava Kumar on Raj Kamal Jha's If You're Afraid of Heights. If you're looking for a compelling reason to read this intense but often somnambulistic writer, try this.

"As he joined the long queue at the service store, for cigarettes, Meo recalled his penultimate infidelity (the ultimate infidelity, of course, had been with Russia)." Yes, yes, I know, it isn't polite to reach into an entire novel and pull out just one line. But the last time the Babu read a line like this was in...a bad Soviet-era novelette. This one has a better pedigree: it's from Martin Amis' Yellow Dog. God help us all.

John O'Hara is one of the genuinely strange cases in American literature. Large in physical size and larger than life in temper and appetites, as a writer he was a miniaturist. His best work, as Geoffrey Wolff correctly judges, is to be found in his short stories and in his first novel, Appointment in Samarra, which is almost short enough to be called a novella. Yet like his contemporary and rival Ernest Hemingway, another gifted miniaturist, he could not resist the temptation to write the flabby, overlong blockbusters that publishers and the mass readership prefer. These books -- A Rage to Live, Ten North Frederick, From the Terrace, Ourselves to Know -- did little to enhance his literary reputation and a good deal to harm it, but they made him rich." The Babu, if he possessed a hat, might take it off in order to salute Jonathan Yardley, one of the few great commentators on books and writing still left.

* "We are compliant, all of us, in the looming extirpation of creatures as neutral toward us as starfish, as friendly as marmosets and as downright helpful as beavers. So what justifies the exceptional treatment given the bad-boy alpha predators?" David Quammen 's new book examines the predator-extermination conundrum.

To borrow Sam Goldwyn's memorable phrase, why does the Booker continue to exclude the Americans out? On the peculiar category of Commonwealth literature, the Babu refers you to Amitav Ghosh's protest and Amitava Kumar's commentary.

There's an interesting discussion on post-modernism over at 2Blowhards. India's still whithering, to use Iris Murdoch's phrase ("Whither The Novel?" "Whither Indian Language Writing?" Whither English as an Indian Language?") more than Derridaing.

The proper study of man is mankind, and the proper study of woman is...The Family! Someone explain to Murli Manohar Joshi that the Dark Ages ended a long time ago.

"Flo Gibson records only the classics -- and only the entire book, never an abridgement. If you love a certain book that isn't a classic, and you want her to 'voice' it, be prepared for a very direct refusal." The Babu wonders whether she would consider doing Dorothy Richardson's Pilgrimage, now that she's recorded her thousandth audio book...

"Zoe hit high school like a tsunami. 'I was one big nightmare for the school. I think I frightened them more than the apocalypse,' Zoe says. As well as pulling down a 3.98 grade-point average, she engaged in activities such as helping to launch a controversial club." The problem with interviewing the author of Please Don't Kill The Freshman, especially when the pseudonymous Zoe Trope is a freshman herself, is that there isn't all that much in the way of fascinating and meaningful biographical detail you can squeeze in to the profile. At least they spared us the kindergarten years!

"Accurately pegged by an Internet blogger as 'beautiful and very smart,' Vida is a part of a coterie of writers -- Heidi Julavits, Dave Eggers and Michael Chabon, to name a few -- who are young, gifted and both blessed and cursed. While they are admired for their work and for leading a renaissance of literature, publishing and philanthropy in San Francisco, they are also major snark targets, annoying others for seeming to have so much brilliance, youth and charm."
A few lines down, the SF Gate mentions: "[Vida is] also married to Eggers, something neither of them likes to discuss. Eggers, of course, is the author of A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, a best-selling memoir that has earned him cult status in literary circles."
The Babu thinks he's just figured out what Julavits and co mean when they plead for an alternative to snark: it's a kind of carefully focused logrolling. There's no real word for it, but it's defined as those strange little noises you hear when someone's doing some major sucking up.

"Book reviewers and the state of book reviewing itself are often under assault, especially by authors." Poets & Writers defends the species. (Link courtesy ArtsJournal.)

"Lahiri's short-story collection won better reviews in the USA than in India, where critics panned what they believed were her negative portrayal of immigrants and questioned whether she was a 'true Indian' who could write about India. "That pushed all my buttons," she says. "It's what I've struggled with: In India, I'm told, 'You look Indian, you speak Bengali, but you're really American.' In America, I'm told, 'You sound and act American, but you're really Indian.' "
Hang on, this is pushing all my buttons. Lahiri's Interpreter of Maladies drew generous, warm reviews in India, though several critics pointed out that the stories actually set in India were far weaker than the ones set in the US. The Babu doesn't recall any major reviewer panning her negative portrayal of immigrants, except for one or two exasperatingly swadeshi souls. He does remember another writer commenting of Lahiri's India-based short stories: "Ah. Yes. Better than usual, but definitely part of the memsahib-writing-about-domestic-servants genre, isn't it?"

Throwaway line from The Las Vegas Mercury: "The fiction market is a bit more focused. With the exception of some "serious literary" (read: inescapably boring) stuff from the Indian subcontinent, most of the work imported from abroad has passed a fairly rigorous screening process--that is, it's seen as having mainstream profit potential by a publishing world that's increasingly narrow, selective and bottom line-oriented."

Arundhati Roy pays tribute to Noam Chomsky. She also recycles what has become a favourite line in her rants against the Evil (US) Empire: "I speak as a slave who presumes to criticise her king." This is why the Babu can't help liking the author; to paraphrase a famous quote, the love affair between Arundhati Roy and Arundhati Roy is one of the most touching tales of our times.

"If we follow Derrida, we face the prospect of an architecture of death for the new millennium." Thank you, Nikos A Salingaros. The Babu remembers attending a Derrida lecture on deconstructionism years ago. He taped the lecture, transcribed it, and read it with increasing bewilderment. In desperation, he trotted off to a professor of philosophy who also had a degree in mathematics and asked her to decipher "this barrage of apparent nonsense". Two days later, the prof returned the transcribed lecture, with just a brief note appended. "This is not a barrage of apparent nonsense. It is a barrage of unmitigated nonsense." (Thanks to Motormouth-2003, whoever you are, for sending me this link.)

Snoopy immortalised Bulwer-Lytton ("It was a dark and stormy night..."), the Bulwer-Lytton bad fiction contest enshrined the man in stone, but perhaps it's time for posterity to be a little kinder to him. Two reviews from The Complete Review...here and here.

Little People: Learning To See The World Through My Daughter's Eyes; Loser Goes First; author of The New Psycho-Cybernetics Audio program. That's Dan Kennedy, prolific author of eclectic tastes--all three of them.

"It's petulance like this that make it hard for me to believe that the Believers' plea for less snark is really just a way of asking reviewers to "engage" with a book. I think that "a feel-good, criticism-free climate, where all ambitious literary books receive special treatment, just because they're 'literary'" is exactly what Julavits and her colleagues want, and I can think of no better proof than their using Fenton's review as their first example of snark's perniciousness." The Antic Muse weighs in on the Great Reviewing Debate.
Over here in my little corner of the world, we get rooked three ways: we've got the feelgood climate down pat for some books (it helps to be i) a serving bureaucrat ii) a friend of the Newspaper Editors or iii) both; we have homegrown petulance, thank you very much; and Incredible Shrinking Book Review (Is Two Hundred Words Too Long?) Syndrome has spread faster than the latest Microsoft virus across the media world. (Link courtesy Bookslut.)

The Guardian's reviewer begs to disagree with Tibor Fischer's assessment of Martin Amis' Yellow Dog . "Begs" is the operative term: "Actually, your first reaction on reading a novel as mind-tinglingly good as Yellow Dog is not so much admiration as a kind of grateful despair. Mostly this is because, like all great writers, he seems to have guessed what you thought about the world, and then expressed it far better than you ever could. It isn't even possible to feel envious towards him without realising, with a sigh, that he has managed to get there first, too."
"Mind-tinglingly good" is an interesting phrase. The Babu has absolutely no idea why the phrase "bootlickingly obsequious" flashed through his mind, but there you are. Yellow Dog hasn't yet reached India; however, Tibor Fischer's Voyage to the End of the Room has, and "disappointing" is about the kindest adjective the Babu might use to describe a work that looks like a fugitive from a Creative Writing 101 chain gang.

My Heart Belongs To Daddy, And Perhaps Carlos Castaneda: "When the father I adored died in 1990, within two years I had found a surrogate in Carlos. I was 'engaged' to a substitute daddy -- virtually the same age as him, an equally best-selling and ground-breaking author for a generation. I was only half-aware of my motivations." Amy Wallace, Irving Wallace's daughter, on her affair with the sham shaman.

"One of the things we look for when we read is just that level of commitment, that totality. We seek out the full realisation of a unique presence, a voice other than our own: the viewpoints of human beings beyond ourselves: the precision of experiences we cannot have, described by somebody we cannot be... The writer gives us two miracles, a world other than that which we inhabit and the ghost of their company, their voice." Since this is A L Kennedy, her speech also includes the brutal truths underlying a career in puppetry, Mr Duck the Postman, and having your picture taken while you balance on a pile of Arran Highland Dress Socks.

The Babu's an unabashed Potter fan, but all the same--hallelujah, the Lord be praised.

"I suspect that most professional critics don’t really enjoy books, the same way most porn stars don’t really enjoy sex. Day after day, fucking or getting fucked by the newest twenty something hipster with a coke problem or an advanced degree Victorian literature -- it must be tedious." Brokentype responds to Laura Miller's attempted evisceration of Chuck Palahniuk in Salon.

Amitava Kumar in the Hindu on Bunker 13's Minty Mehta, an anti-hero for our times. "His seductive cool represents the triumphant upward mobility of the Indian middle class. In the novel, it is the voice of an aggressively Westernised and global elite with a taste for American slang and a variety of brand names. Of course, if you don't buy it, then what you are left to sympathetically examine is the touching pathos of such desire — and the pull of the unabashed gaze that is forever fixed on the upper rungs of the social ladder. MM confidently lays out brief manuals for drug-use, sex, and different types of lethal weaponry. He also presents a manual on torture and the use of chemicals. All such manuals are on the same moral plane. They offer the middle-class readers the chance of self-improvement in a fast-changing world that is opening up to them in ways previously unimagined."

The Babu went through a mercifully brief period when he wrote dark, bitter verse about driving a minibus (still a seriously lethal weapon in the right hands) around Calcutta and mowing down everyone he didn't like (three extra verses were added in tribute to Delhi's lumpen, streets ahead of Calcutta in the crudeness and rudeness stakes). The school authorities didn't like it much (for excellent reasons--it didn't scan very well), but at least they didn't arrest him, charge him and then ruin his entire career. Schools in the US are targetting fiction as a dangerous weapon, unlike the mostly harmless, available over-the-counter common or garden gun.

P K Rangachari offers tips on suitable reading material (candles not included, bring your own) for a power blackout. The only work of fiction he mentions is Jhumpa Lahiri's A Temporary Matter, which set the Babu wondering if there are other works by Indian authors on the subject. He can recall a plethora of references to sweating in the summer, even the odd poetic simile about the drone of the generator in the background, but that's it. What, no novels revolving around loadshedding? No thrillers where the villain cleverly times her murder to coincide with the hour of the scheduled power cut? No Mohsin Hamid-style discourse on the importance of airconditioning as a social marker? Suggestions welcome.

"There have been the inevitable comparisons between Ali and Zadie Smith... Both women are possessed of that potent combination of talent and looks that the book marketers couldn't dream up. But their writing is altogether different."
Okay, indignant Letter to the Editor time: The Babu's heard about this potent combination--brains and beauty too!--in relation to Ali, Smith, Arundhati Roy and Jhumpa Lahiri, and thinks that a call for parity must be made. If the media can't get it through its sexist head that a) some writers, who happen to be women, also happen to be quite attractive and b) this has little to do with the quality of their writing, then perhaps it might at least be even-handed enough to level the same scrutiny at men. Where's the burbling paragraphs about the "talent and looks" of Hari Kunzru or, well, Chuck Palahniuk, then? And (for the last time) quit dragging Ali and Smith into the same sentence.

* "Foul Matter — it's the term for an unedited manuscript — is to publishing what Elmore Leonard's Get Shorty was to movies, a dissection of greed, hypocrisy and ambition. Publishers have been taken over by German conglomerates like Blundenraven and the real-life Bertelsmann. Companies have names like Queeg & Hyde, Grundge and Dreck Inc. An editor called Bill Mnemic regularly steals other houses' authors." See what happens when Sonny Mehta fires Martha Grimes?

What Kind of Furniture Would Jesus Pick? The New Yorker features a new short story by E Annie Proulx, one of those writers who inspires the Babu to stand around looking mushy and holding up a flickering lighter (Zippo, usually) any time someone mentions her name.

Amy Tan smelt a dead rat, hallucinated about a naked man and discovered that she was dropping the first letter of certain words. Back in the Timothy Leary days, it was a bad LSD experience; in Tan's case, it was undiagnosed Lyme's Disease. This sounds like something out of Atul Gawande's case files.

"...Rev TB Pandian claimed that London was 'Mecca for the traveller in search of truth, a Medina of rest for the persecuted or the perplexed in spirit. Though centre of perpetual motion, it is still the Persepolis of human grandeur in repose. To the searcher after enlightenment it is a Budh-Gaya; a Benares for the sinner in search of emancipation. Damp, dirty, noisy London, thou art verily a Jerusalem for the weary soldier of faith.'" Sukhdev Sandhu in The Daily Telegraph on the black and Asian writers who preceded Zadie Smith and Monica Ali. Someone tell him, though, that "dissolute" is an adjective and that the Indians who first went to London may have feared leading a dissolute life, but they couldn't, grammatically, have become "dissolutes" en masse.

And Peter Ackroyd is quite clear that he is not London. The Guardian asked him whether the "character of London was close to his own". '"No. No, I don't think so." Describe your own character, I say. "It's male, it's old, it's diseased, it's impatient. I don't know, that's it." It sounds pretty close to London, I say. "Does it really? Noooooooah. No similarities at all."'

Rowling for the Literature Nobel? Next up, Irvine Welsh. Or perhaps we need more science writers...

Between the covers of Don Quixote or Oliver Twist, Indian nationalists smuggled in books banned by the British Raj.

Outlook reviews Prince of Ayodhya with mildly raised eyebrows: "In the third year of the third millennium, Ashok Banker, with two ‘adult’ novels and an extra ‘K’ to his name, tosses a bit of lust into a pot brimming over with 'childish abridged versions and stiff-mouthed analyses'.... Admittedly, these are just paragraphs in an otherwise magnificently rendered labour of love. And the Ramayana is 'neither history nor biography' but a part of mythology—each reteller puts in his own bit, some even differ on key issues. In Kamban’s Ramayana, Ravana does not physically seize and carry off Sita as Valmiki describes in his. But, surely, a 21st century effort could have done better than reinforcing existing sexist stereotypes?"
Krishna Prasad might have been kinder--Banker has come a long way since the long lost days when he could open a novel (Bad Karma) with this wince-making pun: "Rashmi Brar wouldn't take off her bra." Now he works harder on his timing, even if subtlety remains elusive, as in this passage where Lakshman taunts Rama: "You’ll marry Sita when she comes of age! Don’t deny it, bhai. You’ve always had a soft spot for Maharaja Janak’s eldest. Or should I say, a hard spot!"

The Babu, as should be apparent from his name, has his own problems with Orientalism. But he read Hitchens on Edward Said with growing irritation. "There's no quarrel with the view that "events" occurred on September 11, 2001; but that the military interventions in Afghanistan and Iraq were wars "against" either country is subject to debate. A professor of English appreciates the distinction, does he not? Or does he, like some puerile recent "activists" (and some less youthful essayists, including Gore Vidal), think that the United States could not wait for a chance to invade Afghanistan in order to build a pipeline across it? American Orientalism doesn't seem that restless from where I sit; it asks only that Afghans leave it alone." Could Hitch be more blinkered or sound more tired as he bangs on the same old drum? It's not available online, unfortunately, but for a more searching critique of Orientalism and Said, read Vijay Nambisan on the subject in Language as an Ethic.

Hmm. Notes from an Oriental Occidentalist? "What matters is that in turning our back on the British Empire, contemporary India also turned its back on the institution of Empire. It is this rejection of an idea that is proving costly today. At the root of the problem is the equation of Empire with economic exploitation and political subordination. Yes, there were abhorrent features of the imperial experience but they did not constitute the whole story. Standing side by side with the disagreeable was the philosophy that lay behind the words Civis Britannicus Sum. There was a universal vision that defined the British Empire, a vision that brought India and South Africa, Trinidad and Canada, under a common umbrella. It was an enterprise propelled by a deep sense of mission and it didn’t leave Indians unaffected."

"I cannot remember the first time I met Dom Moraes. I know that he was a part of my growing up. My father recommended his prose 'to clean your palate'. And so in some distant way, I knew a lot about him before I ever heard him call me fucker in rich, soft, plum-cake tones." Jerry Pinto on the quiet man, the unquiet man. More...

"For one glorious night, New Yorkers lost access to their TVs, to the Internet, to their cellphones, and had to turn to each other, to the warm living humanness of each other." Suketu Mehta on the New York power blackout. Things work differently in the Third World: over here in Delhi, where "loadshedding" and "power cuts" are everyday occurrences, the sound of a thousand polluting generators gets in the way of our warm living humanness, alas.

The Guardian review of Raj Kamal Jha's If You Are Afraid of Heights praises his "spare, poetic prose" which also has a "febrile, cold-sweat quality". It raises an interesting issue of nomenclature by using the term "Anglo-Indian fiction". Merle Oberon and Cliff Richards were 'Anglo-Indians'; Jha is a practitioner of a school of writing that lacks a suitable name. Indo-Anglian sounds clunkier but may be marginally more accurate; Indians Writing in English sounds like it has three exclamation marks after it (clever little beggars, aren't they?); and don't get the Babu started on the woeful inaccuracy of the new term, "bhasha" writing, used to define Other Writing in India (Not in the English Language). Perhaps we should just call them writers of Indian origin, or maybe just writers, without any qualifying descriptive adjectives, and be done with it.

They come not to praise Martin Amis but to bury him, says The Independent. "...[Amis has] been mugged, sledged and bloodied in a number of newspaper articles and made the victim of a viperish whispering campaign, suggesting, sotto voce, that the book is rubbish and that Amis is, frankly, washed up. Hardly anybody has actually read [Yellow Dog] (it's been sent to literary editors and selected reviewers under tight embargo conditions), but, somehow, everyone just knows that it's the summer's literary equivalent of Gigli."

* "Fox may well argue that Franken's parody tarnishes its business and its mark, but the whole purpose of political parody is to poke fun at people one disagrees with. If Franken may not use the expression "fair and balanced" in a book that accuses Fox News of failing to be "fair and balanced," there is something seriously wrong with trademark law under our 1st Amendment." The LA Times on the Fox versus Franken imbroglio. The Babu's wondering whether Fox would sue him if he wrote a book about the network called Unfair and Unbalanced (No, Make That Unhinged!)? They don't have that phrase under copyright, surely...

Remember nicotine aversion therapy, which suggested that a smoker might be persuaded to give up by smoking non-stop, up to 60 cancer sticks a day, until the stink and the coughing got to him for good? I think I finally figured out what the Booker's all about--you pick good, decent reading addicts, and then you force them to read hundreds of thousands of words of turgid prose until they come out promising never to read again, not even the phone book. "Somewhere in the distance, dimly glimpsed through an inky forest of print, through murder, mayhem and spinsterish chat, rises the hope, at some point in one's career, of being able to read a book for pleasure again," DJ Taylor writes in the Guardian. He ends on the obligatory note of hope; somewhat strained, perhaps.

Erma Bombeck, Shirley Jackson, Jean Kerr: housewife writers, "willing to admit that the enterprise was often an emotional bust", writes Caitlin Flanagan in The Atlantic. Today you have chick lit. On the whole, I preferred the bad old days of patriarchal oppression--it produced better books.

There is still a faint shred of hope. The Booker longlist also includes Mark Haddon's The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time. Haddon is a man after my own heart, in the sense that he too appears to believe that poodles are the most expendable of the canine species. This is what he said to the Washington Post: "Poodles are slightly annoying dogs," says Haddon. "Dogs are meant to be a kind of butch animal, aren't they? They're meant to be big and sort of hairy and shaggy and smell a lot. Poodles are little and have hairstyles, and they're preened and primped." He giggles. "I think I quite like the idea of having a fork through one."

Dismiss this, if you please, as the grumble of a man who prefers Lampedusa, Sabatini, Cortazar and Garcia Marquez (how could I leave out Dario Fo and James Joyce and Vargas Llosa???) to the present crop. But all that the Babu needed on an especially depressing weekend was this: the Booker longlist has admitted not only Monica Ali's Brick Lane but Martin Amis' Yellow Dog and Margaret Atwood's Oryx and Crake. The first was a sort of 'Bangladesh for Beginners'; the second has been puked on by Tibor Fischer; and the third, unfortunately, is the kind of science fiction Literary Authors write when they've never read the genuine article themselves. If you hear a gargle off to the side, it's just the Babu committing ritual harakiri.

The Complete Review has a comprehensive take on Orlando Figes, his solicitors, and the whole Evening Standard imbroglio.

"Books are left behind (or released into the wild)." Welcome to the phenomenon of bookcrossing.

"Imagine if every item in this newspaper, whether report, opinion, photograph or cartoon, were to be preceded by a stamp, ‘This piece of writing/image has been approved for publication by the Board of Newspaper Censors’. Imagine if these censors thought they had the right to excise actual quotes from public figures, say, something the prime minister has said publicly because they didn’t like the way the quotes were used in a story." Ruchir Joshi, on why it's obscene that documentary film-makers should have to apply for a Censor's Certificate before they can screen their films. This rule applies to Indian documentary film-makers, not foreign. Of course, in what is no doubt a string of coincidences, the films that have run up against this rule have been films about Hindutva and other controversial, anti-national issues.

Time has a special issue on the Asian Journey--it features some excellent writing. It's introduced by Pico Iyer, the man who has always stumbled over the question, where do you come from: "For the Asian diaspora, home, like everything in the modern floating world, has gone global and fragmented, portable and underground. What once might have resembled a well-creased snapshot now looks more like an MTV video."

In parochial vein, there's Pankaj Mishra on Mashobra: "Yet the village also made possible a life of some dignity and leisure—which is rarer than it seems in India, where poverty and deprivation are always relative. In Mashobra, not comfortable but sheltered from the meanness and cruelty of the larger world, I began to write." Also Ved Mehta on Lahore. It's an interesting piece, but as always, brevity is not Mehta's strong suit. "

Paglia cuts against the grain of standard cultural oppositions. A feminist herself, she decries the feminist critique of Western capitalism and insists that 'capitalism produced the modern independent woman.' Despite embracing much of the program of libertarian capitalism, she expresses reservations about Ayn Rand. An emphasis on capitalism and strong individuals is insufficient without an attention to culture and education, to the sources of human excellence found not just in reason but in art and religion, the latter of which Paglia refuses to construe as fairy tales of consolation for the weak." Camille Paglia explained, and by a Distinguished Professor, no less.

Adams Williams is the new James Clavell. Everyone was bored with the Old James Clavell. One of these days, if Williams does well enough, he'll read about some bright spark who will then be dubbed the New Adams Williams.

"I think that parents feel to give voice to what they don't like about parenthood is to betray their children and that is why I found a number of woman, in particular, have been grateful for this book. It's someone giving voice to his or her reservations." Lionel Shriver, author of We Need To Talk To Kevin, in conversation with Robert Birnbaum.

From Bookslut's interview with Steve Almond. Enjoy!:

Almond: I have a secret, that I don't mind you publishing at all. I wear women's undergarments when I'm writing a female character. I know a lot of other writers who do that. They don't talk about it, but there's an entire community of us. Cross writers.

Jessa: Is Norman Mailer in that community?

Almond: I'm not going to talk about Mailer. I told you before the interview, I'm not going to get into whether Norman Mailer wears ladies' undergarments or not. I don't want my name near anything that says Norman Mailer wears women's undergarments.

* Fox News owns the trademark rights to "fair and balanced", so it's suing Al Franken for using it in the title of his book. The Babu, who remembers their unabashedly partisan coverage of the Gulf War, thinks a) they've got to be joking b) of all the words in the English language for Fox to claim, "fair and balanced" have to be the funniest.

"Instead, the post-post poets write the real stuff, the basics, the poem without the baggage of meaning and connection, the liberated poem itself, stripped and streaking down the freeway, no claim on your time or attention longer than the time it takes to watch one run by. Was it human? Was it naked? Did it wave? Was it a prank? What college is it from? What were those word-things it sprayed at us?" Web del sol has the answers, and they ain't pretty. (Courtesy aldaily.com)

"As most people know by now, dictionary makers today merely record how the language is used, not how the language ought to be used. That is, lexicographers are descriptivists, language liberals. People using "disinterested" when they mean "uninterested" does not displease a descriptivist." This is actually a fun article about dictionary-making. Trust me.

Two point five million years ago...and as the Babu choked on that statistic, the Guardian patted him on the back, reminding him that this is roughly the time when we started talking to each other, according to Stephen Oppenheimer.

Christopher Dreher examines the burgeoning remainders market for the Washington Post.

"I am amazed at Stendhal's accomplishment, at the insane daring of the work. The first part of the novel is like watching a child play with matches, the second part like watching the house burn down." Andre Alexis on Stendhal's The Red and Black.

"Gil Courtemanche dedicates his first novel to seven friends who are dead, four "unsung heroes" still alive, and "Gentille, who served me eggs and beer and could be dead or alive, if only I knew"." This is what happens when you try to write a novel about Rwanda.

"For example, Gretel is raped." Call the Babu squeamish, but he found it hard to probe further into the contemporary retelling of Hansel and Gretel after he reached that sentence. His apologies to the rest of you.

Buy Christopher Paolini's book. Or be warned--the teenage author might just wrestle you into doing the deed.

"Elliott comes up with nearly as many questions of his own: Is it moral to improve oneself through artificial means? Can medical solutions address deep social needs? When you reinvent yourself, who do you become? Elliott observes that our preoccupation with medicalizing and diagnosing all that ails us may not necessarily hold the key to the wholeness, comfort, and happiness that the popularity of enhancement technologies suggests we crave. Indeed, this clinical impulse has the potential to obscure as well as to explain." The Atlantic interviews Carl Elliott.

This editorial is actually an Amit Chaudhuri short-story in embryo. But enjoyable as it is, should you trust the man's view of science fiction? He starts by invoking Kubrick-fair enough, if an interpreter rather than a creator of the SF genre--then moves on to Tarkovsky and incredibly, O V Vijayan...

"When did we give up on ourselves? How did this indifference come about?" Kiran Nagarkar celebrates--well, commemorates--Independence in Outlook.

"The emergence, in particular, of tweens as a distinct population is at once one of the most urgent and most underexamined social phenomena of the era." Christianity Today examines tweens and the book business.

"I see much that was wrong in Nehru’s approach. Yet I still call myself a Nehruvian Indian. For, in some key respects, I stand were Nehru did. I admire his practice of social tolerance, his respect for diversity and for democratic procedure, his refusal to reduce India or ‘Indianness’ to a dominant religious or linguistic ethos." Ramachandra Guha in Outlook on the dying appeal of Nehru.

"I know more about literature than most reviewers. I know what I'm doing. And my books will be around a lot longer than they will. Sometimes I think they're only saying these things out of jealousy. My work seems to make some people insane, but I think that's good. It inspires passion in people." Candace Bushnell joins the ranks of famous writers (I'm trying hard not to put apostrophes around that word) who hate critics. Pass the champagne--Schramsberg, it's the best.

Support Palestine, or try to open up the debate, and watch your book contract disappear. The German publishing house that pulled Ted Honderich's book after anti-semitism groups complained about a statement he'd made--"the Palestinians do indeed have a moral right to their terrorism"--ought to be ashamed of itself.

Honderich replied, "Micha Brumlik, the director a Holocaust institute and I understand a professor in your university's institute for general education in science declares me to be an antisemite. This is because in my book I defend the moral right of the Palestinians to their resistance to the state of Israel, as the state of Israel defends its moral right to the killing of Palestinians. The charge of antisemitism outrages me. I could not believe my eyes." Here is Brumlik's letter, a letter from Professor Jurgen Habermas, and Honderich's reply.

No one comes out of this well: Brumlik sounds like a censoring demagogue, Habermas defends Honderich against the charge of antisemitism but comes out sounding weak when he says that the book--which he recommended to Honderich's publishers--is sloppy, and Honderich does himself no favours by asking for Brumlik to be dismissed from his post, in a fit of righteous wrath. Counterpunch carried an interview with Honderich in December 2002 where he has more space to defend himself, and comes out with very rational arguments in support of his position.

* Tibor Fischer's on a roll. First he boasts about firing his agent, Andrew 'The Jackal' Wylie; then he disses Martin Amis' Yellow Dog, while managing to respect the publisher's embargo--if only by the skin of his grinning teeth. "Yellow Dog isn't bad as in not very good or slightly disappointing. It's not-knowing-where-to-look bad. I was reading my copy on the Tube and I was terrified someone would look over my shoulder (not only because of the embargo, but because someone might think I was enjoying what was on the page). It's like your favourite uncle being caught in a school playground, masturbating."

Louisa Young is the Old New J K Rowling. She and a dozen others.

Bradford loses her suit. The Babu thinks she may have got a slightly raw deal; on the other hand, knowing how the industry uses "inspiration", you'd never be able to tell if they'd plagiarised. In a Bollywood rendering of Lolita, for instance, this is how the scenario would play out.

Humbert Humbert dances around trees with Dolores while watching an adorable Lolita, played by an overweight, pert brat, grow up. In disturbing dream sequences, the audience sees a grown-up Lolita, played by an overweight, pert actress, dancing around trees with Humbert Humbert. Then a flashback will reveal that Humbert Humbert's long-lost twin brother, Himbert Himbert, had gone to the bad, seduced Dolores' cousin sister and died, but not before marrying her in a fit of remorse and producing a son, Hambert Hambert. Lolita and Hambert Hambert meet when some goons attempt to kidnap her by helicopter and take her off to a dark warehouse in order to have their wicked way(s) with her. In between dance sequences, in which the audience realises it was actually he and not Humbert Humbert prancing around the shrubbery, Hambert Hambert will follow them on a horse, kick the door of the warehouse open, deliver a stirring speech and kill seventeen assorted baddies armed only with a knife. (Him, not the baddies. The baddies are armed with Kalashnikovs, grenades and Japanese katanas.) He and Lolita fall in love but realise It Can Never Be because they are of the same blood.

Just as Lolita, distraught, prepares to marry Humbert Humbert's business associate's scheming son (who was responsible for the helicopter kidnap, but no one knows that, except for Lolita's pet dog, who urinates comically on his leg every time he comes to the house), Dolores' cousin sister will die of a broken heart, in a touching deathbed sequence where she hands Hambert Hambert a locket. The locket contains the secret of his birth: he is not the son of Himbert Himbert at all, nor even hers (she is Fallen But Virtuous, it turns out), but the son of an old friend of hers who appears every now and then in between song sequences as a mysterious godwoman who blesses everyone and cries a lot. (She is dying of cancer, too, just to tidy up the loose ends.)

Because of a distant--very distant--family connection, Humbert Humbert and Hambert Hambert appear to look like each other, but it's too distant to matter. In a final sequence, just before the marriage vows are pronounced, Hambert Hambert will discover the truth from the lips of his real (but dying all the same) mother and parachute through the roof of the pandal in order to say, "Yeh shaadi nahin hoga! (Subtitle: This marriage will not happen!") There is another shootout, but Lolita's dog urinates on the villainous son's leg at just the right time and slipping, he loses the battle. As Humbert Humbert and Dolores look on, misty-eyed, the pundit re-emerges from behind the balustrade where he has sheltered during the shootout, and the wedding starts up again, uniting Hambert Hambert and Lolita. In the climax, the pundit pulls off his fake beard to reveal that he is, really, Himbert Himbert, having survived all these years but hidden his identity for fear of causing his family distress. Because of a vow made to Hambert Hambert's father, his closest friend, he had long since been shadowing the happy couple. Even during the song sequences. The dog yaps happily in time with the catchy wedding number, someone mercifully strangles the damn thing, and everyone goes home happy with the Russian genius who produced a work as ripely entertaining as Lolita.

What the Spectator article refers to is Inglish rather than Hinglish: the latter has been embraced by the Indian advertising industry in such immortal catch lines as "Yehi hai right choice, baby" and "Don't be a bandar, taste the thunder". Inglish is what's responsible for new coinages: Lawyers mull Ceasework, says a headline in The Telegraph, or dearly beloved turns of phrase not remarkable in themselves, but memorable because of the context in which they're used. (When my grandfather wanted my teenage friends to quit playing Black Sabbath albums and go back to their own homes, he used to shuffle in and remark in mild tones, "Eet eez high time..." Everyone understood perfectly. It can be alarming, as in the apocryphal tale of the good, respectable Delhi housewife who tells the milkman, "You will kindly enter from my backside only henceforth", directing him to the back rather than the front door of her home.

Hinglish is full of cricket terminology and army metaphors, with echoes of P.G. Wodehouse and Dickens. It contains clunky puns and impeccably logical neologisms. In short, it is a delight." David Gardner on the pleasures of Hinglish. (The Babu speaks Binglish: an allied dialect, Bengali rather than Hindi influenced, where Thackeray (William Makepeace, not Bal) joins Dickens and where the ultimate insult is "You are a nonsense!")

* "When Joyce Carol Oates was 14, growing up poor in rural New York, someone gave her a typewriter, and since then there has been no stopping her." Lewis Jones complains in The Daily Telegraph that 30 novels, 24 short story collections and other works--adding up to about a hundred--is a bit much in our "age of minimalism". But why must prolific equal bad? We won't even mention Dumas, but how about Compton Mackenzie, Ford Madox Ford, Georges Simenon and company...

Living in a time when we’re awestruck by jargon and terrorized by academic prose, when obscurity poses as profundity, when the idea of the concrete and the real has been etherized into discursivity and discursiveness, it is worth remembering and reading Ramanujan as the Absolute Other of the average American academic and her Indian apes." Rukun Advani remembers A K Ramanujan in the tenth year of his death.

More from the Lest We Forget section: Shashi Tharoor on Malcolm Muggeridge. "...if he was famously contrarian, it was in the service of a larger cause — the preservation of a society in which 'everything should be subject to criticism', authority was always suspect, and conformism was to be avoided."

Humphrey Hawksley likes blowing up India; it was Bombay in his previous novel, and it's Delhi, followed by most of India and Pakistan, in The Third World War. This little quirk aside, Hawksley appears to be an entertaining hack among thriller writers, something of a one-trick pony who's served up the Doomsday scenario three different ways in his last three books. Outlook's review takes him seriously; Business Standard complains that he creates inadvertent comedy as opposed to black comedy; and Ashok Malik at the Indian Express lets rip. "That Indian ‘commentators’ have written turgid appraisals of The Third World War speaks for both their self-esteem and sense of literature. If this book had been about Venezuela and Brazil would anybody have paid attention? Is publicity dependent on a book’s quality — or simply on how often it mentions India?"

"That left me wondering, however, what function religion fulfills, and why it appeals to so many people I suspect that it has to do with the human brain; what my late husband Heinz called 'the lizard brain.' We still dream when we sleep—much as people did thousands and millions of years ago. Our brain associates feelings and images and makes up 'story lines' that pervade our unconscious, and powerfully affect our sense of power and meaning. This kind of experience gives rise to religious tradition, and responds to the images, the music, the worship, and the stories we know from ancient traditions." Elaine Pagels, author of Beyond Belief (NB: if you're wondering, she has a completely different perspective on religion than a certain V S Naipaul, who wrote a similarly-titled book about his travels in the world of Islam) on the politics of Christianity.

After reading Pradeep Sebastian on bibliokleptomania, the Babu realises that he is one of the worst offenders among that tribe. Sebastian doesn't provide different grades of book thieves, but the Babu is clearly the Biblioklept Adeptus Absentus, who gets away with his many thefts under the guise of apparent absent-mindedness. For some odd reason, however, the Babu's light-fingeredness has never been exercised in bookstores and libraries--he strikes only among friends and relatives, or in other words, nearest and dearest who may suspect his dark secret, but are constrained by familial love never to speak a word of the gaps in their bookshelves.

Reading David Hajdu's take for the NYRB on "comics for grown-ups", the Babu's attention was snagged by the first paragraph alone. "Comic books, the rock 'n' roll of literature, have always been a rigorously disreputable form of junk art for adolescents of body or mind. Hyper-energetic, crude, sexually regressive, and politically simplistic, comics—like rock (and, in recent years, hip-hop)— give fluent voice to their audience's basest and most cynical impulses. These are their virtues, arguably, as outlets for emotional release and as social counteragents." Replace "comic books" with "science fiction" and you have the standard argument levied against that genre too.

"Not only is it illegal, not only is it pirated, it's a really bad translation." Job Notice: Translators willing to render Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix into Spanish as she should be spoke, please apply to the Chilean book piracy industry forthwith.

We're not the only ones having trouble with the school curriculum. In Russia, it's no go for Dr Zhivago.

Decades ago, Gertrude Stein proclaimed: "A rose is a rose is a rose." (That line is fun to type, incidentally--try it sometime.) Now we have Zadie Smith: "People are people are people, and the sooner the London novel gets to grips with that and stops writing the Indian-English novel or the Black-English novel, just to let the novel be itself."

"I have known John Slater all my life. Perhaps you remember the public brawl with Dylan Thomas, or even have a copy of his famous book of "dirty" poems. If it's an American edition you'll discover, on the inside flap, a photograph of the handsome, fair-haired author in cricket whites. Dewsong was published in 1930. Slater was 20 at the time, very nearly a prodigy." The first chapter from Peter Carey's My Life as a Fake.

Back to more important matters, like one more reason to adore James Thurber. The New York Times (*) reports on an anthology of Thurber letters--he wrote as many as 1,200 a year. "He could enchant. (To the John O'Haras: 'I wonder if you are the same O'Haras I used to know? He was a tall handsome violinist and she was a moonlight serenade.') He could gossip. ('Charles Addams is now mixed up with a woman lawyer who bites him and is said to be handy with a knife when she's mad.') And of course he could skewer. (Re a Time magazine profile riddled with mistakes abut him: 'This is a little like finding out that the injury you suffered in the Cornell-Pennsylvania game was actually syphilis.')

How to write a tragedy in one line: "Saki wrote a dull novel."

The Little Mag has a new translation of Manik Bandopadhyay's Primal Passions.

"Welfare checks, they make you wealthy/ Medicaid, it keep you healthy/ And if you forward this to your employees when you're tired/ Tomorrow the papers will tell you you're fired." Pity the former top emergency official in Arkansas who discovered the perils of chain mail the hard way.

More on Penguin India CEO David Davidar's projected move to Canada; Naomi Klein on what he should expect there ("our newfound status as Hippie Nation").

No links available just yet, but Publisher's Lunch reports that Ruth Prawer Jhabvala will be coming out with her first novel in years. The last book I remember reading by her was a collection of short stories that didn't completely absorb me. The novel is something I'd look forward to, though, especially after all these years.