"In banning Shivaji: Hindu King in Islamic India by James W. Laine, the Sushil Kumar Shinde government has unveiled a new order governing intellectual discourse and rowdy criticism. And a zero-sum game is glaringly evident. The victors of this round are the book vandals of the Sambhaji Brigade, who last week brandished their destructive power at Pune?s Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute for providing assistance to Laine, a professor of religious studies at an American university." The Indian Express puts it better than I could, in a season of one disgraceful book ban after another.

And Dilip Chitre reports on the "neo-fascism" and "domestic terrorism" that has changed his life as well: "This is the first time in my life that I am sitting down to write an article while a commando sits in my living room to protect me from possible assailants. This provision has been made by the home minister of my state, Maharashtra, to protect me from other Maharashtrians, who were earlier incited by their "leaders" to attack the Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute (BORI), a world-renowned centre of research in Indology at Pune."

Michael at 2Blowhards has a follow-up on the book people versus movie people post he did a while back. "I find the view that what makes a work "literature" is that it's "not-trash" -- let alone the view that literature is an ineffably-marvelous thing that justifies all the degradation and tedium -- not just annoying but factually inaccurate. Just as movies don't (and can't) exist without all the money and sex and ego, there's no such thing as books without the book-making life, and without the publishing life." Lovely stuff.

The Rushdie roundup: he did the Bombay party circuit, assorted lunatics offered to blacken his face, and the script he's writing for Padma Lakshmi about the relationship between an older man and a younger woman is not autobiographical. Perish the thought. (Remember Nila in Fury? Remember how sweet it was to see the man burble on and on about her beauty? Remember how each sentence about her was announced by a chord of heavenly music, written in softly hued alphabets, and haloed all around? Remember how it made you want to throw up?)

Female sleuth, aged 74, hopes makeover will change her life.

This is one of those dumb-ass things: the Babu read the article, meant to link to it, and forgot, which is why it's been on every book blog bar Kitabkhana this far. The Atlantic on its book-reviewing policy: "If we run more than the predictable number of reviews of novels composed in English, we run fewer than the predictable number of reviews of books on politics, public policy, and current affairs. This is partly because we assiduously cover these areas in other parts of the magazine, but mostly because a very high proportion of these titles are just godawful. (I write this as someone who once made his living as a foreign-policy analyst.)"

The Babu has a feeling this is going to be his favourite story of the year. From the Village Voice:
"Sammy is the door-boy for kindly local doctor Samuel Hubbs, a stand-in for Foote himself?they share the same Lexington Avenue address and have written books with the same titles. Sammy Tubbs becomes his young prot?g?: In a sort of med-school Pygmalion, the older white Hubbs molds the young black Tubbs into a doctor. In each respective volume, amid servant high jinks and literal monkeyshines, Tubbs gets lectured on Muscles, Circulation, Digestion, and the Nervous System. But the fifth and final volume bears a curious inscription on its cover: A Book for Private Reading. Leaf through it, and you'll see why: It has line drawings of genitals, of Rand McNally road-map accuracy.
It's a Victorian sex-ed manual. For children. Starring a monkey."

Haruki Marukami discovers that his birthday is a public event. It makes him uncomfortable: "...at least at that moment some of the people throughout Japan - it was a nationwide broadcast - standing (or sitting) by their radios may have had at least some fleeting thought of me. "So, today is Haruki Murakami's birthday, eh?" Or, "Oh, wow, Haruki Murakami's ** years old, now too!" Or, "Hey, whaddya know, even guys like Haruki Murakami have birthdays!" In reality, though, how many people in Japan could have been up at this ridiculous pre-dawn hour listening to the radio news? Twenty or thirty thousand? And how many of those would know my name? Two or three thousand? I had absolutely no idea."

"For example, the monkeys could master simple word structures, analogous to realising that "the" and "a" are always followed by another word. But they were unable to grasp phrase patterns analogous to "if... then..." constructions." Hmmm. There was someone at the Babu's former workplace who was just like that.