Cogito, ego sum

This story is even better if you know who the First-Rank Naavelist in question is. I'm not telling, and neither is an uncharacteristically discreet Ruchir Joshi, who met the man and his monumental ego.
From Ruchir Joshi's Which One Will He Shoot?:
"Within two days I meet an artist who tells me he thinks his work is “pretty smart”, an Ivy League academic who casually slips in the sentence “but I’m a very good teacher and they like that” while describing his current job, and finally, an “Asian Indian” (as Desi Americans are called) writer who explains literature to me thus:
“There is the first rank, the greats you know, Turgenev, Faulkner, James, Bellow, and these guys are forever. Then there is the second rank, you know, the Roths and the Updikes, people like that. And then there’s the rest.” “And where do you place yourself?” I ask, regretting the question even before it’s fully out of my mouth. “Me?” his voice goes to top gear inside his nose. “Oh, my first book was close to the top of the second rank, I’d say. And I’m now writing my second book, which is a kick-ass naavel which should put me right in the first rank, no question.”
My jaw thuds to the ground, not only because everyone I know who’s read this man’s first book has found it excruciatingly bad, but also because of the sheer, shameless, straight-faced, self-pedestalization. So shocked am I that I have no breath left to answer when he asks, “And what do you do?” I mumble something about “films” and columns in newspapers after which the guy pays no more attention to me. Shortly, the great man leaves, presumably to continue his second magnum opus, and the two Indian writer-friends who’ve introduced him to me fall off their chairs screaming with laughter. “Tera to bolna hi bandh kar diye usney! Khatam kar diya tere ko!”

Wanna be a writer? Join the Foreign Legion

Shashi Tharoor on the connection between diplomacy and writing:
"My friend and former United Nations colleague Jayantha Dhanapala...argues that the professional diplomat, like the sensitive writer, has to be able to mix with both elites and masses; be firmly rooted in his own culture while open to the experience of others; have inner resources to fall back upon in coping with the isolation of a foreign posting (what Auden called 'this nightmare of public solitude')."
Tharoor cites the obvious successes--Paz, who was a great diplomat as well as a great poet, Neruda, who was a great poet and let's not discuss his diplomatic skills, and Ivo Andric. He is (diplomatically) silent on the small but determined band of Indian diplomats who produce poetry and prose of a quality that would cause not just riots, but complete regime changes, if you made it compulsory reading for citizens.

In search of the naive and sentimental reader

Reading Michael Dirda on Madame Bovary, I found myself nostalgic for the days of innocent reading, when books were simply books and not part of the daily grind. One of the very few drawbacks of working in a profession where your job consists of reading a lot is that you lose the ability to approach a book without your mental dissection kit in tow. It's a bit like chefs, who never get to eat a real meal once they cross a certain level of expertise, because everything's about whether the basil's fresh and the place settings are just so and the grains of rice have separated as they should.
I pulled down Madame Bovary and tried to read it as though it was something I was discovering for the very first time, which is like trying to pretend that you're a wide-eyed virgin after years of consecrated lust: it can't be done.
Somewhere out there, though, is someone who's coming to Flaubert without any idea of what's in store for him. The lucky stiff. As Michael Dirda says:
"What truly matters is this: Madame Bovary is available in a superb new translation, in a handsome hardback volume, and if you've never read it, or if you've only worked through it in first-year college French, you need to sit down with this book as soon as possible. This is one of the summits of prose art, and not to know such a masterpiece is to live a diminished life."

Say it Louder, Ms Desai

"So much is being written in India now, every mail brings me manuscripts to look at by Indian authors. It has suddenly become a craze. It's not much to do with writing, it's to do with celebrity culture. Because a few like Rushdie and Arundhati Roy have become celebrities, it's encouraged others to try writing."
--Anita Desai, speaking at the Edinburgh festival.

Booker 2004 longlist

It's out; the Scots are complaining, the Canadians aren't. I imagine the Pakistanis are happy about Nadeem Aslam being on the list, or at any rate they're sending the Babu a lot of 'Pakistan Zindabad' emails. The Guardian nabbed the usual Booker-as-a-horse-race metaphor earlier than the rest this year. Many of the big names fell at the first fence, to use the cliche-du-jour. The judges comment here and here. Rowan Pelling said: "Some of the biggest names disappoint. Only the most besotted fan would claim that Louis de Bernières, Muriel Spark, VS Naipaul and Jeanette Winterson have produced their best work this year. But they have gongs aplenty and will still sell in shed-loads. And if you don't deadhead the roses, how will you encourage new shoots?"
The Literary Saloon has a nice rant on the judging and submissions process. Read it keeping The Bookseller's wimpy defence in mind: "The current rules are the least bad ones available." Yeah, how's that for enthusiasm?

Here's the longlist, with current odds, and here's the official Booker website:

Alan Hollinghurst: The Line of Beauty 4/1

Louise Dean: Becoming Strangers 8/1

David Mitchell: Cloud Atlas 8/1

Colm Tóibín: The Master 8/1

Nicola Barker: Clear: A Transparent Novel 10/1

Chimamanda Ngozi: Purple Hibiscus 10/1

James Hamilton-Paterson: Cooking with Fernet Branca 12/1

Gail Jones: Sixty Lights 12/1

Gerard Woodward: I'll Go To Bed at Noon 12/1

Susanna Clarke: Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell 16/1

Neil Cross: Always the Sun 16/1

Achmat Dangor: Bitter Fruit 16/1

Lewis Desoto: A Blade of Grass 16/1

Sarah Hall: The Electric Michelangelo 16/1

Justin Haythe: The Honeymoon 16/1

Shirley Hazzard: The Great Fire 16/1

Nadeem Aslam: Maps for Lost Lovers 20/1

John Bemrose: The Island Walkers 20/1

Ronan Bennett: Havoc, in its Third Year 20/1

Sam North: The Unnumbered 20/1

Nicholas Shakespeare: Snowleg 20/1

Matt Thorne: Cherry 20/1

He's back. Should I care?

I know, I know. This is a New Naipaul Novel; if you're really into alliteration, the New Naipaul (Nobel) Novel. Given the number of times I've reread A House for Mr Biswas and the affection The Suffrage of Elvira, Miguel Street and much of the early work still inspires, there should be joyous hallelujahs or some such.
But Half a Life was such a disappointment that I'm not even sure I want to read about the continuing life and times of Willie Chandran. Magic Seeds, thank heavens, doesn't have the Exotica Cover--cobras, forsooth-that the Picador edition of Half a Life sported, but it has...the Jacket Literal instead. Cue picture of cupped hands. With seeds, presumably magic. Them people who get to work on Nobel-prizewinning authors sure do use their imagination.

Why you should read this Padma Lakshmi profile

For these three priceless quotes:
1) On her husband, Salman Rushdie:
"In India, he is very, very famous. He's like Faulkner to Americans, or Dostoevsky to Russians." I especially like this when it's followed by: "The only thing she doesn't like about him is his beard. It plays havoc with her skin."
2) On the uses of frozen grapes as seduction aids:
"Use the green ones, not the red ones because the red ones stain the sheet. Just keep them in the fridge - you never know when a date is going to end up back at your place."
3)On TV shows:
"When I was growing up in the US, there was a show called The Frugal Gourmet. Unfortunately, he got pulled up on some paedophile charges. But leaving that aside, he was good."

Amitava 101

Subtitled how to summarise an author.

Joshi at 120 mph

Ruchir Joshi dropped by Fortress Amerika recently. He had fun at O'Hare:
"...[W]hen I reached into my pocket for my passport, he froze like a Rottweiler about to attack: 'Keep your hands on the counter! It’s not a good idea at all, to take your hands out of my sight!” This, with each and every immigration and customs officer, not to mention the airport security, all porcupined with assorted weaponry. What did the man think I was going to do? Pull out my ceramic AK-56, the one that Heathrow Security had failed to spot, the one that I had failed to use on the flight, and open up on him? Of course, I said none of this out loud and I kept my hands on the counter — after all, there was the small matter of gaining ingress to Fortress Amerika to be kept in mind.
Of course, American paranoia is neither a new phenomenon nor one confined only to the Right-wing. It runs through American society like streaks of fat marbling a slab of meat, from star anarchotics like William Burroughs and Hunter S. Thompson to mere ‘inhalers’ like Bill Clinton and his Secret Service to the chair of the Memphis city council who, just few days ago, said he would bring in the anti-bomb squad if a delegation of Iraqi civic leaders (invited by Colin Powell’s state department, no less!) entered his city hall."
I love it when the boy gets into full ranting stride.

Gmail accounts

Kitabkhana's emulating its betters: we have six Gmail accounts (ie free Gmail invites) to give away on a first come, first served basis. If you'd like one, please let me know in the Comments box--and include your email address, otherwise I won't know where to send the invite.

The calligrapher's tale

I have terrible handwriting; despite the efforts of a clutch of convent nuns, my English script refused to follow the precise curlicues of copperplate, and my lines remain unruly, displaying a tendency to walk off the page entirely. My Bengali and Hindi handwriting was even worse when I was young: one language inevitably flowed into the other, so that I would write entire sentences in a hybrid script that I thought of privately as 'Bhindi'.
What I never quite understood was a peculiar separation between the Mother and the Other Tongue(s): in English, I seem to need to pack in as many words as possible, and over the years, have perfected a kind of miniaturised script that needs a magnifying glass in order to be legible. But in Hindi and in Bengali, I sprawl. I need room. My letters are large, dashing; my words breathe. And I like both styles. I love the feeling, in English, of words constantly tumbling over one another, pushing and shoving for room; and I enjoy the expansive, roominess of writing in Bengali. For all of this, I've never experienced the special relationship that a calligrapher has with words, as Nassim Mobasher chronicles in 'Writing and Dancing':

"I wonder if this is illegal in this Islamic Republic classroom: making our words dance in public. Provocatively moving our alphabet on the page, with suggestive rhythm that’s bound to dispatch public morals into decadence. 'Loosen your seen’s,' he says to me. I can’t! Not with Big Brother watching.
This is calligraphy 101, and we are being taught the art of Nastaliq calligraphy: 'The Bride' of all other forms of calligraphy, as our dancing instructor... I mean, um, professor, refers to it. She's beautiful, this bride of ours. She is also an Iranian bride, Ms. Nastaliq, because the art of calligraphy was a movement that was very much pursued by Iranians, or so our books say (they tend to be very Iranocentric)."

"A legacy of words"

Hanif Kureishi finds his way to the past through a most surprising medium:
"On the floor in a corner of my study, sticking out from under a pile of other papers, is a shabby old green folder containing a manuscript I believe will tell me a lot about my father and my own past. But ever since it was discovered I have been glancing at it, looking away, getting on with something else, thinking about it, doing nothing. The manuscript was given to me a few weeks ago. It is a novel written by my father, a legacy of words, a protracted will, perhaps - I don't know yet what it contains, only that it is called An Indian Adolescence."
As he writes a few paragraphs later:
"Some sort of search is beginning. I guess you don't really go looking for your parents until middle age."

Oriya poet dead

"Eminent Oriya poet and freedom fighter Satchidananda Routray died Saturday, his family said.
He was 89.
The end came in a hospital in his home city of Cuttack, where he had been admitted last week.
A Jnanpith winner, Routray, was inspired by Marxism in his youth, but had chosen Lord Jagannath as the theme of his works in his later life."
One of his best-known poems commemorated Baji Rout, a 12-year-old boy often cited as the youngest freedom fighter in India. There's a solemnly ungrammatical but sincere and oddly moving description of Baji Rout's role in the freedom movement that bears quotation:
"In the midnight of 10th October 1938,the Police Forces attacked the village Bhuban and arrested some persons without any reason. They took them to the Bhuban Police Station. The Conch of the Prajamandal was sounded by the village leaders. The people woke up and Gheraoed Bhuban police Station with a loud noise to release the arrested persons and leaders of Bhuban. The Police Fauza did not listen the demand of the agitators and fired at them. Raghu Naik and Quri Naik were shot dead by Police force and many persons were injured. The police force thought that their lives were not safe. So they wanted to come Dhenkanal through Nilakantapur Ghat. That was the shortest way to Dhenkanal. At the end of the night on 11th October 1938 while it was raining, they reached at Nilakanthapur Ghat.
Baji Rout a young boy of 12 years was in charge of country Boat in the Nilakanthpur Ghat of Brahmani river. The Force ordered him to cross the river by his Boat which he denied fearlessly. The police force became revengeful and fired Baji Rout along with Laxman Mallik , Fagu Sahoo. The Young boy was the real patriot of the country who had much more love for the country and he died for the country. He is the youngest Freedom Fighter of the Country."

The Lost Boys, part deux

A sequel to Peter Pan? Hmmm.
Captain Hook faces a new enemy: rust.
The Lost Boys start an off-Broadway cabaret act and debut to rave reviews.
Tinker Bell moves to India, where that stupid little light of hers learns to cope with three power cuts a day.
Peter Pan and Wendy get married, but he's constantly sloping off with Tiger Lily and she's a prissy nag, so they end up in couples therapy.
John Darling names his children Precious and Little, ensuring that they will suffer the same surname angst as him.
And the Real Hero of the book turns out to be Nana the dog, who runs a successful broking business with Smee.

Fischer (1)

Take a few days off, and something or the other is guaranteed to crop up, even in the middle of August (traditionally a slow month in the publishing industry) that the rest of the blogosphere will link to long before the Babu gets off his, er, donkey.
Tibor Fischer files this year's obligatory Booker judge report:
"I can understand publishers putting out something unbrilliant out of loyalty to an author (admittedly unlikely) or putting it out because they've already paid for it, but I can't understand them sending it in to the Man Booker..."
And no one can accuse Tibor of ignoring the Big Issues:
Finally, judging isn't that hard. Only a few key questions ought to be weighed up. Is this novel written by a friend of mine? A good friend of mine? What could they do for me in the future? Would they deliver? Isn't this novel by that reviewer who panned my last book?"

Fischer (2)

It may not rank as Literature, but Bobby Fischer's letters to US State Department officials are already on my personal top ten list of the best things I've read in ages.
Here's a sample, but frankly, you're missing out if you don't read the chess maestro's complete works:
Dear “Peter” (you won’t tell me what your last name is) I called you yesterday at the U.S. Embassy in Tokyo at about 10:00 am and we discussed some of the various vicious crimes the U.S. and the Japanese governments have committed against me working in collusion and in conspiracy since at least July 13, 2004....
Apparently my renouncing my U.S. citizenship does not fit in too conveniently with the U.S.-Japanese plot to illegally deport me to my “home” country the U.S.A. and illegally try, convict, imprison, torture and murder me there. At about 9:30 am this morning I will request my kidnappers here to place a call with the U.S. Embassy in Tokyo for about 10:00 am. I will again demand that either you or someone else from the Embassy come over here so that I can officially renounce my U.S. citizenship today. I’m quite sure that in violation of my rights you will not. (If I’m wrong so much the better.) But assuming that you won’t I will now do the job myself. Since you are refusing to cooperate as the U.S. law commands you to I believe this renunciation has full validity under the law. That is if one can even speak seriously about “law” in a lawless country like the U.S.A. Here goes: I am Robert James Fischer. I am a U.S. citizen. I was born on March 9, 1943 in Chicago, Ill. U.S.A. My U.S. passport no. is or was Z7792702. It was issued at the U.S. Embassy in Bern, Switzerland. The issue date is January 24, 1997 and the expiry date is January 23, 2007. I Robert James Fischer do hereby irrevocably and permanently renounce my U.S. citizenship and all the supposed rights and privileges of United States citizenship. I will do my very best to get this letter hand delivered to you at the Tokyo U.S. Embassy today. Free at last, free at last, thank God almighty I am free at last.

Sincerely,
Robert James Fischer

He's getting married, btw.

Curiouser and curiouser

I'm hoping Moorish Girl will recover soon and make some sense of the Khouri affair, because lord knows I can't. First Norma says that she only lied a little and that she didn't want to be paid royalties; now she's wanted in two countries.

Dillon Kosla: Both Sides Now

Dillon Kosla was born Asha, and had 15 surgeries in five years in order to remake himself as a man; he's a successful attorney in San Fransisco. This book sounds as though it might challenge several of the entrenched ideas we have about gender. Rights to his book, Both Sides Now, have just been sold. From his agent's website:
"Dillon's journey is articulately expressed through his discovery of how true open-mindedness and acceptance (as well as bigotry) are not, as some would believe, linked to any particular political ideology or group, but rather to our own personal comfort with our gender identity and/or our own preferences and tastes. This point is highlighted by examples of how mainstream men and women often effortlessly-and intuitively-related to the man before them, while those in groups proclaiming to be about tolerance and diversity often expressed discomfort and rejection."

Right, and Jesus had an Adam's Apple

Not that my religious sensiblities were offended (I have none), but this did seem like a slightly OTT title for a novel:
From Publisher's Lunch:
"Will Clarke's LORD VISHNU'S LOVE HANDLES, about a
man haunted by psychic visions of impending doom,
which threaten his family, his career, and ultimately his
sanity -- that is, until he meets two annoying secret
agents who teach him what it really means to lose his
mind..."

The Tree Bride Gets the Axe

"To be Michikoed": to be either praised or slaughtered by the ever-so-slightly-predictable and very influential New York Times reviewer.
Latest victim: Bharati Mukherjee's The Tree Bride.
Method of execution: hatchet, blunt-edged. Count the adjectives: "Ponderous", "bloated", "discursive", "long, stilted", "swollen, ungainly", "preposterous", "flawed".
The Babu has long since been guiltily aware that he should make the appropriate appreciative noises about Bharatidi; pioneering writer of the diaspora, sensitive portrayals etc etc. But he has bitter memories of trying, and failing, to wade through Jasmine and has never been able to read BM since. It's nice to have his opinion validated.
Oh, I forgot: "maladroit".

The Jargon File for Reviewers

Tom Payne's guide to reviewese is unputdownable (well, it was unpickable up because I read it on the Net). No, seriously, his wickedly funny, darkly comic takedown of the cliches reviewers' use coruscates with deceptively simple examples of how the blurb's taking over the main pages. I'd say that he had a lightness of touch that reminded me of William Burroughs on speed allied to Dorothy Parker on anything at all, but let him tell you all about it in his own searingly honest fashion. Which is, of course, also inimitable, magisterial and er, searingly honest.

"Inside Cavafy's poems"

"Alexandria has, of course, changed in the 71 years since Cavafy's death, but it still feels like his city. The cafés where he watched the world go by are still in business. The street markets and flaking 19th-century apartment blocks have not been swept away. Deep underground lies the buried city of the Macedonian Greeks and, somewhere, the lost tomb of Alexander the Great. Being here is like walking about inside Cavafy's poems."
Duncan Sprott examines C P Cavafy's "quiet life" and gains insight into the poet and into Egypt.

I'm working on my next outright lie...

Quote of the day: "Mr Black said his understanding was that [Khouri's] attempt to amass evidence in her favour was 'a work in progress'."
And The Sydney Morning Herald has got a little list.

And Yet The Books...

I used to think that adulthood was defined as that stage of your life when you set aside poetry for the minutiae of daily living: friends and their problems, deadlines, tax returns, landlords, the permanent freelancer's affliction known as 'nomonia', paperwork, relationships, numerous changes of residence, all that shit.
Then a few years ago, a friend sent me a poem I'd read and loved as a teenager, but had managed to banish from memory. He didn't know this, but the poem, which he'd handwritten in lovely cursive writing on mellow handmade paper, reached me at a point when I'd decided to give up trying to scrape a living from hackwork and do something more lucrative instead, like join the corporate rat race.
And Yet The Books, by Czeslaw Milosz, reached just in time to remind me about all the stuff that was really important to me. Reading, freedom, ideas, beauty. It's all in there. Milosz, 93, died on Sunday (obituaries here, here and here), but this poem, like a lot of his other work, is something I'll carry with me forever. Here it is:

And Yet the Books

And yet the books will be there on the shelves, separate beings,
That appeared once, still wet
As shining chestnuts under a tree in autumn,
And, touched, coddled, began to live
In spite of fires on the horizon, castles blown up,
Tribes on the march, planets in motion.
"We are," they said, even as their pages
Were being torn out, or a buzzing flame
Licked away their letters. So much more durable
Than we are, whose frail warmth
Cools down with memory, disperses, perishes.

I imagine the earth when I am no more:
Nothing happens, no loss, it's still a strange pageant,
Women's dresses, dewy lilacs, a song in the valley.
Yet the books will be there on the shelves, well born,
Derived from people, but also from radiance, heights.


Czeslaw Milosz


A few of his poems are available here; and here's an excerpt from his Nobel lecture.
"The exile of a poet is today a simple function of a relatively recent discovery: that whoever wields power is also able to control language and not only with the prohibitions of censorship, but also by changing the meaning of words. A peculiar phenomenon makes its appearance: the language of a captive community acquires certain durable habits; whole zones of reality cease to exist simply because they have no name. There is, it seems, a hidden link between theories of literature as Écriture, of speech feeding on itself, and the growth of the totalitarian state. In any case, there is no reason why the state should not tolerate an activity that consists of creating "experimental" poems and prose, if these are conceived as autonomous systems of reference, enclosed within their own boundaries. Only if we assume that a poet constantly strives to liberate himself from borrowed styles in search for reality, is he dangerous. In a room where people unanimously maintain a conspiracy of silence, one word of truth sounds like a pistol shot."

Fiddly bits

Finally got off my ample Bengali ass and updated the links section (that's the sidebar that runs along the left--right? dunno, I have the equivalent of dyslexia when it comes to directions and numbers--of the blog). There's a small Reference Shelf with a strongly desi flavour; Addictions has a whole bunch of freshly added blogs. Go visit, especially The Mumpsimus, who does a better job than I do, Gunga Din, wot? And Manjula Padmanabhan, who used to run a freakishly good website yonks ago and is now back in the saddle again at Marginalien. And Caferati, which hopes to do for Bombay's writers what the adda did for Calcutta in the good old, dead old days. And Pepys' Diary, which takes a simple idea--post one page of Pepys' Diary for every day of the year--and turns it into pure joy. And, and, and...oh well, go see for yourself.

Happy anniversary

The Literary Saloon's celebrating two years of "linking and ranting and raving" and getting to stories of genuine import way ahead of the rest of us sad sacks. Good cess to them; they do a nice line in them rants.

This sounds like Llareggub

Under 30, have a novel in you? It's worth sixty thousand pounds if it wins the newest prize on the block, The Dylan Thomas Prize, for great fiction written in English anywhere in the world by anyone under thirty. (If you're 31 and you've just reached 'The End', bet you're feeling pretty stupid right now.)
Two observations: 1) there are too many literary prizes in the world already, it's beginning to resemble those nauseating parties for brats in Delhi where the brats who go to the party bring presents and the brat who throws the party buys presents for the brats who brought presents and they repeat the same stupid cycle ad infinitum at the next kiddie blowout. All you're left with in the end is an excess of rubber dinosaurs.
and 2) having said that, I'd be cool with the prize if the organisers made it mandatory for the winner to down 18 whiskies at the awards ceremony.

I'm trying not to be superstitious here, people

...but Friday the 13th is turning out to be a very bad news day for authors. Humayun Azad, controversial Bangladeshi author who survived a very vicious knife attack earlier this year, was found dead in his Munich apartment. It seems he died in his sleep, but his family wants the death investigated anyway.

And the hoax confirmation report...

...is in. It's pretty clear now that Norma Khouri wrote fiction, not fact, or to put it less kindly, was lying her head off to everyone from her publishers to readers to women's rights groups to, well, fill in the blanks. Random House said: "We apologise to booksellers and readers who purchased Forbidden Love believing it was a true story".
The truth is out there. Way out there. I'm still wondering what made her do it (let me see now--money, fame, respect--oh, okay, that would work), and whether she actually believed any of her lies.
Expect lawsuits: hers, which isn't exactly making Malcolm Knox sweat and theirs.

Ngugi wa Thiongo: brutal homecoming

Ngugi wa Thiongo knows what it's like to join the ranks of writers for whom home is the place where they'll throw you in jail if you show your face at the door. He spent over two decades in exile before moving back to Kenya recently. And he'd just returned to Kenya from Uganda, after delivering a lecture, when this happened:
"The gang had confronted Prof Ngugi as he showed a friend, Mr Kiragu Chege, out of the flat, rented for them by his publishers.
They burst in through the door as the professor and Mr Chege tried to fight them off, then made them lie down in different parts of the room before beginning their sustained attack.
Mr Chege was forced to lie beneath a sofa as the gang demanded money. He too was pistol whipped and injured on the face and hands.
Then the gang burst into the bedroom where his wife had been sleeping and, when Prof Ngugi heard her scream, he ran to her rescue but was beaten off and burned on the face with cigarettes."
He and his wife are expected to be released soon from hospital. News reports say that the attack on them wasn't politically motivated; cold comfort to the author, I'd imagine.

Ketchup, Ketchup*

--Porn is good, says Rushdie. Maybe he should find out what happens when "the A list meets the D cup". Oops, didn't he do that already?
--Norma Khouri's time is running out; the author accused of making up her "true-life" honour killing tale disappeared after the news reports came out. We ain't seen nothing yet, though she has turned some documentary evidence over to her publishers. Malcolm Knox, who broke the story, says he isn't worried: "I don't think Norma Khouri has enough evidence to get up in court and make statements about defamation. I think if she does get up and make statements, she might get herself into even deeper trouble than she is already."
--"The best love story ever told, next to Romeo and Juliet" is coming to a theatre next to you. I don't know whether to applaud or duck; Gabriel Garcia Marquez has finally given in and sold the film rights to Love in the Time of Cholera for between one to three million dollars.
--This BBC story on the Library of Unwritten Books has been doing the rounds for a while. "You will not find these titles on bookshelves or bestseller lists - One-Eyed Olaf, The Man Who Was Addicted to Seeing, Poke the Pig and Scrumping in Persia.
These books, along with many others, have not been written - so they are only to be found in the Library of Unwritten Books.
An art project travelling the UK, this library is collecting stories and ideas for books people would like to write - but never have, and probably never will." (Link via The Literary Saloon.)
--Neat concept, but I prefer the Invisible Library. More Borgesian to my mind, it's "a collection of books that only appear in other books. Within the library's catalog you will find imaginary books, pseudobiblia, artifictions, fabled tomes, libris phantastica, and all manner of books unwritten, unread, unpublished, and unfound".
--Elsewhere, the blogosphere's all worked up over Nicholson Baker, who isn't what you might call a household name in India. As usual, the Literary Saloon has the most comprehensive roundup of what the whole thing is about. There's more over at Rake's Progress.
--But sitting here in Delhi, the Baker brouhaha makes me think, not for the first time, that not all of the literary sphere can be successfully globalised. Baker doesn't "transfer" especially successfully into the Indian reader's scheme of things; I'm relatively incurious about the controversy over Checkpoint. David Foster Wallace, on the other hand, has written a long, long article about the Maine Lobster Festival, which might be considered a far more arcane subject than the potential offing of George Bush--but his essay is something I'd try and get my hands on. Oh well. Maybe it's just me.

* As in, "what did one tomato say to the other during the annual Great Tomato Race" etc.

Egostroking, sort of

The Babu intended to do the usual "huzzah, hallelujah" thing when visitors to Kitabkhana crossed a certain number.
The problem here is that he's a) numerically illiterate and b) technically challenged.
So while he intended to wave the flags and hire marching bands when Kk crossed 10,000 visitors, the truth is... he forgot to keep count.
He has no idea how many people dropped by Kk between March 2003, when the blog kicked off, and January 2004, because he didn't include a counter. (Yeah, yeah, the hallmark of an amateur blogger!)
And he managed to deactivate the Sitemeter thingie for two months somewhere around May-June 2004, so those stats are missing.
And most people who get to this site after a Google search are searching for things like "Rushdie Padma Lakshmi wedding" and "book quiz". Some perverts are here because they were looking for "harami+lusty", which led them to items by Amitava Kumar (an excerpt from a piece on Hindutva hatespeak) and an article on James Joyce's letters to his wife. One mystified the hell out of the Babu by searching for "godawful killer dogs". This is truly weird because the Babu doesn't remember ever blogging anything about godawful killer dogs, though now he might. (He can take a hint.)
Allasame, the blog crossed 14,000 visits--not page views, it apparently has 21,000 page views, whatever that means--between January and August. Not counting May and June and some of July, because, er, they haven't been counted.
Most of the people who drop by Kitabkhana seem to stay for a while, and the Babu's especially glad to see that many who come by wander off and browse either the brilliant blogs listed in the sidebar or the author websites listed there.
So that's the report. I still don't know how many people have dropped by at Kk over the last year; I have no idea why I'm getting a LOT of referrals from a casino site based in Florida; and I have no clear visitor profile, geekspeak for "I have no idea why anyone but the Babu would waste its time out here".
But thanks for coming by, and thanks for hanging out here when you do. Bookmark the page. Tell your friends. Before I manage to bugger up the counter and my statistics as I will doubtless succeed in doing again.

Cold shoulder for No Cold Kitchen

Nadine Gordimer just de-authorised her authorised bio, much to the dismay of Ronald Suresh Roberts, who spent seven years working on the book.
The Guardian reports: "Mr Roberts said the Nobel laureate objected to his quoting a letter from the 60s in which she revealed disdain for Ruth First, a fellow anti-apartheid activist who was subsequently assassinated by a letter bomb.
'I keep thinking of points to score off the silly bitch,' the letter allegedly said.
The biographer also said she was unhappy that he mentioned her feelings about the apparent failure of another writer, Doris Lessing, to congratulate her on the Nobel: 'I suspect she thought it didn't seem sufficiently Olympian.' In fact Ms Lessing had congratulated her but the letter had been mislaid."
Gordimer has a different perspective.
"Objections which were raised by me in March 2003 have to date received no response nor to my knowledge have been rectified as contractually required. There has been no question of my opposing publication of the book, only of the portions of the text that have not been agreed with by me in terms of my agreement with Mr Roberts.
In respect of the substantial number of inaccurate and in some instances untrue statements, I am not prepared to take the matter further in the press. I naturally reserve all my rights."
The Babu would've commented on the issue, but he's sidetracked by a minor if puzzling detail. The Guardian report lists 'Burger's Daughter' among Gordimer's works, which I remember reading as 'Burgher's Daughter'. But it seems that 'Burger' has become an acceptable alternative spelling for 'Burgher'--or maybe not. I'm trying to figure out when the switch happened, even as I attempt to banish visions of Big Mac offspring, waxed wrapper, pickles and all, wandering around South Africa and flashing winsome girlish smiles at the locals.

Get in the Ring: Subrahmanyam vs, well, half the world

"Many of Chaudhuri’s basic assumptions are largely unfounded. Let us begin at the beginning. It is quite untrue that public airings of intellectual differences are rare in India." That would be Sanjay Subrahmanyam, preparing to air several of his own differences, with a vengeance. (Amit Chaudhuri's two-part article is linked to in 'The Great Debate', posted on Kitabkhana on Sunday, August 1, 2004. Scroll down for the post.)
"This is what I mean when I see Nandy as a colonial thinker, namely his utter subservience to Orientalist clichés regarding India’s past. In this Nandy is like Ranajit Guha or Dipesh Chakrabarty, other thinkers whom Amit Chaudhuri much admires. Their position may be ostensibly anti-colonial, but in fact — no matter what their internal divisions — they are all prisoners of the very same heritage as the Chaudhuris, both Nirad and Amit, as well as of the Greater India theorists of the inter-war period. Amit Chaudhuri’s own essay drips with cultural cringe, with his gratuitous references to Eliot, Blake, Lawrence, Auden and Whitehead, who are obviously the defining points of his universe."

Uh-oh, Calcutta!

Sandipan Deb on The Weekenders: Adventures in Calcutta, a new compilation of writings:
"Great cities are like the most infuriating of women. Mother, lover, deceiver, bitch. Unreasonable, angelic, compliant, tyrannical, heaven and hell. So it’s no coincidence that the two great cities of India are ruled by powerful feminine principles. Mumbai has Ma Amba, astride a tiger, and Kolkata, the ferocious Kali, her earrings fashioned from corpses, necklace of human skulls, and girdle of hacked-off hands."
Deb's just softening you up before he borrows a weapon or three from one of the good ladies mentioned here.
"W.F. Deedes writes about two children, recent migrants to the city, who get lost and find refuge in Howrah station. Ali writes about Deepak, who got lost and found refuge in Howrah station. Irvine Welsh’s narrator lived as a lost child for some time in Howrah station. Victoria Glendinning’s narrator makes friends with a little girl living on the streets. Initially mystified—surely there’s more to Kolkata than children living on streets and on railway platforms—I figured it out when I discovered that all the writers had been taken around the city by Tim Grandage who runs an NGO that works with street children. Leading to the above obvious outcomes."

Reread any good books lately?

Here's what other people have on their list of books to re-read, in case you missed the comments section on the previous post.
From Zigzackly:

Books I Return To:
First, from your list:
1. To Kill a Mockingbird
At least once a year. Damn, i'm one of the soppy masses then? Have always considered this the perfect parenting handbook.
2. Catch-22
3. Haroun and the Sea of StoriesAnd:
4. The Prophet: i know, i know.
5. Anything by Wodehouse. As Evelyn Waugh says on the back of all the Penguin editions, "Mr Wodehouse's idyllic world can never stale." At least for me it doesn't.
Anything by
6. Douglas Adams
7. Asimov
8. Clarke
9. Woody Allen
10. James Herriot
12. Groucho Marx
11. Doyle's Sherlock Holmes stories
12. Yes Minister and Yes Prime Minister
13. The Moon's a Balloon & Bring on the Empty Horses--David Niven's autobiographies.
14. Don't Mr Disraeli i forget the authors, and i can't lay my hands on the book.
And to lower perceptions of my brow even further:
14. Asterix and Tintin and Calvin and Hobbes comics

Books I couldn't read more than once:
1. Alice in Wonderland: i think i read this for the first time when i was too young to appreciate it. But i still like sipping at random.
2. The God of Small Things: Mm. Similar reasons.
3. The Catcher in the Rye: Five or six attempts over several years to finally finish it. But i do reread Nine Stories now and again.
4. Lord of the Rings: A book i first read late in life. Been planning to reread, but never get down to it.

And i know you said books you haven't finished don't qualify, but:
Books i've never been able to get through
1. The Trotternama and have never been tempted to go back, though there's a copy on my shelf.
2. Vernon God Little One day, one day.

And with your continued indulgence
Books i've been meaning to read for yonks, but somehow haven't got down to
1. Most of your list except the pitiful few i mentioned up here.
2. A Suitable Boy
3. The Complete Works, Shakespeare: Oh, the lack of a literary education shows again
4. A collection of Conrad that's been sitting on my shelf for three years
5. Almost everything by the IWE (*Indians Writing in English) set.
6. Stephen King's books, except for Carrie and On Writing

Birnbaum wrote:
"After reading a 1200 page book, Mailer's Harlot's Ghost, I had a very odd sensation that stemmed from trying to answer why I had persevered in reading a laughably and hopelessly bad novel. The odd feeling returns with a mere contemplation of the issue.
Anyway, I find it hard to re read but I do make it a point of going back to Garcia Marquez's 100 Years of Solitude and Love in Time of Cholera. I have been thinking about having another go at Pynchon's V."

And the Marginalien wrote:
"... as to the list of those I WOULD reread if I 'had the time':

Yukio Mishima's SEA OF FERTILITY
Mervyn Peake's GORMENGHAST (all three)
Douglas Hoftstadter's GOEDEL ESCHER BACH
Doris Lessing's CANOPUS IN ARGOS quintet
John Fowles' THE MAGUS
Joseph Heller's CATCH-22
Umberto Eco's THE NAME OF THE ROSE
JRR Tolkien's THE LORD OF THE RINGS (alas, I find that the movies have sort of destroyed the books for me. I no longer feel that intense and intimate sense of 'ownership' of the story) and in particular THE HOBBIT
George Perec's LIFE: A USER'S MANUAL
Anthony Burgess's A CLOCKWORK ORANGE
Louis Berniere's CAPTAIN CORELLI'S MANDOLIN

ahhhh ... and so many others, lurking on the other side of my mental bookshelf, alas out of my current reach.

Also -- I have just realized there is a type of book that I HAVE lavishly and exuberantly 'reread' many times over -- and that is:
Robyn and Rand Miller's MYST, RIVEN & even EXILE, which I didn't like much.
and ALL OF TINTIN!!! Over and over and over again. I suppose I must be a visual person.
And like I said in my previous post, children's book lie outside the pale, because I reread them many times over as a child, in particular, and forever:
Lewis Carroll's ALICE THROUGH THE LOOKING GLASS and IN WONDERLAND
EB White's CHARLOTTE'S WEB
Kenneth Grahame's THE WIND IN THE WILLOWS


Then there is the list of books that I enjoyed at the time but would never dream of rereading again:
Sergeanne Golon's 'ANGELIQUE' series (it shocks me to find that I am willing to admit I read them -- but I really DID enjoy 'em!)
Salman Rushdie's MIDNIGHT'S CHILDREN
AS Byatt's POSSESSION
Daphne Du Maurier's REBECCA
I Allan Sealy THE TROTTERNAMA
-- oohhh ... and many more.

I also have a list of books that I have never got around to reading which I wish I had but now know I never will:

Tolstoy's WAR AND PEACE
Proust's REMEMBRANCE OF THINGS PAST
All of James Joyce aside from ULYSSES which I read and think I liked, except I'm not sure how much I understood. There must be others, but it's getting late, and I fear the server is about to disconnect out of sheer boredom."

Thanks, all. If you have your own list to add to the list of lists, go ahead. Or be listless :) Whatever!

Stepping in the same book twice

This report inspired the Babu to compile a rough, happily biased, and highly subjective list of books that require re-reading, and books he was unable to get through a second time.

Books I Return To

1) The Iliad, Homer
It's the battle scenes. The bits about gaffing people through the jaw.
2) Catch-22, Joseph Heller
Just for the pleasure of saying 'Major Major Major Major' over and over again.
3) To Kill a Mockingbird, Harper Lee
Yup. Soppy choice, but I have the masses on my side here
4) The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, Muriel Spark
5) Most of Faulkner; some of Flannery O' Connor
6) Tagore's Shesher Kabita and for some reason, Rajarshi
7) Bestiary, Julio Cortazar
Whenever I want a touch of strange
8) The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Milan Kundera
This one's pure nostalgia--takes me straight back to my teenage years
9) The Leopard, Lampedusa
Yeah, yeah. It's like he's writing about my family.
10) The Mahabharata, especially in different translations
11) Fahrenheit 451, Ray Bradbury
As a reminder of what might yet be
12) A Portrait of the Artist, Dubliners, James Joyce
Joyce was an honorary Bengali, you know that?
13) Haroun and the Sea of Stories, Salman Rushdie
I reread Midnight's Children out of duty; this one out of pleasure
14) A Canticle for Leibowitz, Walter Miller and
15) A Case of Conscience, James Blish
16) A Room of One's Own, Virginia Woolf
17) All About H Hatterr, G V Desani
Fourth reading and I still haven't figured the damn thing out
18) Alice in Wonderland, Lewis Carroll
The day I grow tired of Alice is the day I'm tired of life
19) A House for Mr Biswas, V S Naipaul
20) Mrs Dalloway, Virginia Woolf
21) Why isn't there any Shakespeare, given that I reread the plays all the time? Because we had to reread Good Will so often in school that I no longer know whether this is a choice of a reflex.
22) Instead, Pale Fire, Speak, Memory and Lolita, Nabokov
23) And Dostoevsky bar the potboilers
24) A High Wind in Jamaica, Richard Hughes
For some reason, people look at you very strangely if you say this is one of the greatest books of all time


Books I couldn't read more than once:

1) The Fountainhead, Ayn Rand
2) Make that "anything by Ayn Rand"
3) And ditto Ron Hubbard
4) Hey, no fair leaving off Khalil Gibran

That was fun. Now for the real list. The rules: you can't include books that you haven't finished; to qualify, a book must be something that you've read once, perhaps disliked, perhaps even enjoyed, but that you cannot bring yourself to go back to.

1) Doors of Perception, Aldous Huxley
2) The God of Small Things, Arundhati Roy
Loved it at first reading. But balk like a nervous horse at the prospect of a second.
3) Finnegan's Wake, James Joyce
Once was quite enough.
4) Tropic of Cancer, Henry Miller
"This is not a book, in the ordinary sense of the word. No, this is a prolonged insult, a gob of spit in the face of Art, a kick in the pants to God, Man, Destiny, Time, Love, Beauty.."
Didn't live up to that promise.
5) War and Peace, Leo Tolstoy
Once more into the breach, my friend? I've been promising myself I will, soon, some day, for the last 12 years.
6) Heat and Dust, Ruth Prawer Jhabvala
Read the book, saw the film, what more do you want from me?
7) Most of Lin Yutang
Maybe the style's dated, maybe the politics. In my old age, I think she was a waste of time from the very beginning
8) Atomised, Michel Houellebecq
You know those French novels that everyone talks about and reads and has a copy of around the house and two years later, you wonder why you bothered?
9) The Wings of the Dove, Henry James
This one's weird. I enjoyed it. I thought about it a lot. And I just can't read this--or any James--again. No idea why, but it's like walking uphill on a glass slope.
10) Infinite Jest, David Foster Wallace
What, go through all those footnotes again?
11) Gone with the Wind, Margaret Mitchell
Frankly, m'dear, the racism hits you between the eyes the second time round
12) Shane, Jack Schaefer
Nope, I didn't want him to come back
13) The Handmaid's Tale, Margaret Atwood
There should be a law banning the literary-minded from writing bad SF
14) Starship Troopers, Robert A Heinlein
I still can't believe I FINISHED the darn thing, forget reading it again
15) One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest, Ken Kesey
Read this when I was 11, and have been haunted by the fear that I'll stop thinking it was brilliant if I ever reread it
16) Eucalyptus, Murray Bail
It's like the perfect one-night-stand--you don't want to come back and discover that the dude snores
17) The Chip Chip Gatherers, Shiva Naipaul
I have no idea why I read it in the first place
18) Faust, Goethe
Once you know how it ends, why bother?
19) Remembrance of Things Past, Marcel Proust
If I had two lives, I would read this again; but it would need another life all to itself.
20) The Trotternama, I Allan Sealy
I keep browsing through this, but have never been able to start at point A and work my way across to Z after the first time
21) Clarissa, Richardson
Wouldn't even have ploughed through this thoroughly unrewarding artifact the first time round if my college hadn't employed sadists as teachers

Garcia Lorca, RI (Not Quite In) Peace

From The Guardian: "On the one hand, those already campaigning for a comprehensive exhumation of some 30,000 Franco victims scattered in similar graves around Spain see Lorca's case as a chance to set a precedent. If Lorca can be dug up, they will ask, why not the rest? They are backed by leftwing intellectuals who see, in Lorca, a symbol for the butchery, cultural and human, carried out in the name of Franco's doctrine of "national Catholicism".
On the other hand, however, lie the poets' six nieces and nephews, members of a wealthy family, some dedicated to heading publicly funded Lorca foundations, who are still seen in Granada as influential. They are backed by conservative intellectuals whose rallying cry is: "Let García Lorca rest in peace."
Ian Gibson, the Dublin-born writer whose detective work finally located Lorca's grave more than 30 years ago, disagrees. He has said that digging up the grave would provide final proof that this is, indeed, where the poet lies, and also show whether Lorca was beaten - or shot in the arse - before his death." (Link via MoorishGirl.)

The Lobsang Rampa defence

From the Sydney Morning Herald (or try this link, or this one, if you don't want to register):
"Twelve days after the Herald's revelations that the author Norma Khouri fabricated her best-selling book Forbidden Love, her publisher Random House has lost track of her and is 'increasingly concerned' at her silence.
...Last week she set, through intermediaries, several deadlines by which she would come out with her evidence. Each deadline has passed, and she has not told Random House whether she is at her home on Bribie Island, elsewhere in Australia, or even, as has been reported, in the United States. It is understood the publisher has not spoken with her for nine days."
KItabkhana suggests that Khouri might want to try the T Lobsang Rampa defence. T Lobsang Rampa's account of how he grew up in a lamasery was proved to be a fraud when the Daily Mail discovered that "Rampa" was the son of a Devon plumber, whose real name was Cyril Henry Hoskins. As Nicholas Parsons recounts in The Book of Literary Lists:
"When the story broke, Hoskins/ Rampa was holed up in a Dublin hotel, but said he could explain everything. He was, he said, actually an Englishman whose body was inhabited by a Tibetan lama. This bodily possession had occurred one day after he fell out of a tree while trying to photograph an owl. As he lay stunned on the ground a lama in blue and saffron robes floated towards him and then, so to speak, entered him."

Florence of Arabia

Christopher Buckley explains the Book Title Ha-Ha Effect in this Atlantic interview:
"After years and years of headlines about car bombs and suicide bombs (as Dorothy Parker would say, "what fresh hell is this?"), and amidst some really wonderful reporting from behind the iron veil, if you will, by very brave women who documented what was done to women in Afghanistan under the Taliban—as well as books like Azar Nafisi's Reading Lolita in Tehran and the works of Fatema Mernissi—I became sort of enchanted with the idea of liberating Arab women. I mean, how much worse could things get in the Middle East if some of them had a voice? And then the title "Florence of Arabia" came to me. Unfortunately, I can't lay claim to it. It's from something Noel Coward said to Peter O'Toole about his performance in Lawrence of Arabia: If you were any better-looking you'd be Florence of Arabia.
...It's probably the best title I've had. I say that because every time I mention it, it gets a laugh. That's a good start. Moby Dick, that doesn't get a laugh. The Scarlet Letter, nope, no laugh there. Even The Great Gatsby! Florence of Arabia makes people laugh."

Two Seekers

Pankaj Mishra reviewed Ruth Prawer Jhabvala's Nine Lives for the New York Times recently, and followed up with a review for the Washington Post of Charlotte Bacon's There is Room For You. It's a pity they didn't run in the same magazine, because the two reviews offer a perspective on what two very different seekers found in India. (The Babu likes the idea of people coming to India to "find" themselves, inner peace, the yeti, poverty, reality and etc--reinforces the deeply patriotic view I have of my country as a cross between a giant oddbin and a rubbish dump):
Here's Mishra in the NYT:
"Jhabvala, who spent much of the 1960's in India, was also well placed to observe European and American seekers who sought to escape the bourgeois materialism of the West and often encountered in India the tackier materialism of the East. Feckless middle-class Westerners, unctuous Indian middlemen and charismatic but fraudulent gurus proliferate in novels and short stories like 'Travelers,' the Booker Prize-winning 'Heat and Dust' and 'How I Became a Holy Mother: And Other Stories.' These were suave comedies, albeit with an undertone of melancholy, and they showed Jhabvala's cosmopolitan ability to evoke entire cultures with a few well-chosen details.
But it was also in these books of the 60's and 70's that Jhabvala's satire began to harden into cynicism. Her Western seekers usually ended up badly, defrauded and exploited. The Indians they met were either indolent fools or sexually rapacious knaves. East is East and West is West, Jhabvala seemed to say, and they meet only in silliness and depravity."
And here he is in the Washington Post:
"Anna travels to Delhi, Agra, Varanasi and, finally, Calcutta. In Varanasi, she meets British and Spanish tourists and falls for a young Israeli student of Sanskrit. In Calcutta, she rescues a child from destitution. During her travels she reads her mother's account of an Indian childhood. Much of this sounds like 'Heat and Dust,' one of Ruth Prawer Jhabvala's many sardonic fictions about middle-class Western women adrift in India, seeking complicated answers to personal problems."

Fake it Till You Make It

Norma Khouri was supposed to make a statement to the media answering all the doubts Malcolm Knox raised about her identity (tick one): a) yesterday b) today c) three days ago. I have no idea; all I know is that she ain't sung yet.
From the Sydney Morning Herald, the paper that exposed Khouri as a fake, comes cold comfort in the form of a spoof:
"So, what can I say: Knox has got me, fair and square. But what you may not realise is that "Malcolm Knox" is himself a creation. The young literary editor, hardly out of short pants, but with a couple of bestsellers already in print? Of course, it's all too good to be true. In truth "Malcolm Knox" is the nom-de-plume of the Herald's veteran rugby league writer, Roy Masters, who had long been searching for an outlet for his more sensitive and sensual storytelling.
What's less well known is that "Roy Masters" is himself a fiction; his muscular, ball-by-ball league reports are in fact filed by Good Weekend's fashion columnist, Maggie Alderson, ever hungry for a break from reporting Europe's tempestuous fashion scene.
Yet what may be the least known fact of all is that Alderson - with her side-businesses of "Knox" and "Masters" - is herself a fake: in truth, the whole newspaper is written by two gnarled sub-editors in the couple of hours after lunch."

Let it bleed

One of the Babu's closest friends hated the religious proscriptions on menstruating women implacably; she found a measure of relief in entering temples on "forbidden days" while humming the Stones lyrics:
"We all need someone we can bleed on
And if you want it, baby, well you can bleed on me
We all need someone we can bleed on
And if you want it, why don’t you bleed on me?"
She said she'd really, really vibe well with a god/ goddess who might be prepared to sing this back for her. I'm hoping she's reading this, because she's going to love 'Lost Pages from Sahih al-Bukhari’s Chapter on Menstruation' by Mohja Kahf:
"And Our Mother Hava (Eva) also said: One last thing before I leave. You may hear ugly stories about me in later times of darkness but do not believe them. I, your grandmother, who loves you even though you are yet unborn except in my hopes, tell you: Verily, your period is not a curse but a blessing. It is one of the Signs of God, so learn to read it.
And Hazrat Bint Hawwa remarked, commenting on the words of Our Mother, and explaining in a different way the refraining from namaz during menses: You do not need to pray during your period only because your bleeding is prayer. Not because it is pollution—they got it wrong, it is the other way around. It is prayer so powerful that people, if they knew, would come and touch the feet of the menstruating woman. It is the manifestation of the sacred role women are given, no matter if some of them choose to bear children and some not; for even those who do not bear children participate in the monthly rites. Contemplation of this can lead to elevated spiritual states.
And she (MSBGP—may she be given pleasure) said: Listen. This is what it sounds like to hear words that love women. Words that need no excuses and explanations. Words that do not make women curl up and die inside.
And those present raised their hands and said: Teacher, can I recite Quran when I have my period? Can I touch the Quran? What about a translation of the Quran? Can I pick it up if I am dusting the shelf? Can I recite a whole sura or part of a sura? Can I recite a whole aya or part of an aya? Can I recite a dua if I am in fear? Can I recite kul a’uthu bi rab al-nas if I am in need of it? Must I keep silent?
And the teacher said, these are the questions of women living in shame. These are not the questions of those accustomed to being honored."

The Great Debate

In the first part of a two-part article, Amit Chaudhuri had written:
"Back in Calcutta after a month in England, I found that a debate, or a public difference of opinion, between two Indian academics had gone all but stale. Its venue had been an unlikely one, a national newsmagazine known as much for its secular credentials as it is for grading the schools, colleges, and restaurants of the nation somewhat arbitrarily: a cross between (to think in terms of the media in the country I had just left behind) The Guardian and Time Out. That this erudite quarrel had been conducted in these pages reminds us that there is still no highbrow journal of the ideas in our country that could claim to have a decent nationwide circulation. The academics in question were Ashis Nandy, a psychologist by training, a sort of cultural theorist/ sociologist by vocation, lately retired from the Centre for Studies in Developing Societies in Delhi; and Sanjay Subrahmanyam, who holds a chair in South Asian history at Oxford."
This week, Amit raises several interesting questions:
"I believe the problem arises from the darkness of our inherited language of self-definition, the tragicomic language of nationalism, full of tricks and pitfalls. Nandy belongs to a generation for whom the 'indigenous' was integral to an anti-colonial critique; it’s a term that has transformed itself, subtly, into becoming part of the ammunition of the Hindu right wing. It’s the paradox of the language of our nationalism; that it contained within it the seeds both of our secular middle class and its fundamentalist other, our pluralism and our intolerance. Subrahmanyam has inherited this language as well, and falls into one of its traps, lapses into its opacity, when, for instance, he authenticates secularism by calling it 'Indian'. On first reading, there seems to be no reason to contest this. On second reading, you begin to wonder what he means by 'Indian', and in what sense a historian can use the word in this absolute and possessive way. The word at once gives historical specificity to, and takes it away from, Subrahmanyam’s argument; it raises as many questions as it answers. 'India' is a nationalist construct, a secular construct, a right-wing one; as an idea and location, it is heterogeneous and conflicted in terms of class, region, and history. Which 'India' is Subrahmanyam talking about?"

Nostalgia ain't what it used to be...

I'm reminded of how starved we are in India for decent arts coverage on the first Sunday of every month, which is when the Hindu Literary Review goes up on the website. It brings back a kind of nostalgia for the days when most decent papers had an arts & books section, a design page, and proper theatre reviews--never mind that the prose was often turgid, the criticism all-too-often half-baked (hey, I wrote some of that stuff. I know whereof I speak!). Now what do we get? Page 3, which offers stale gossip about tedious people in turgid, half-baked prose. I'll take nostalgia, even if it's for the imperfect.
Anyway, this edition of the Literary Review has pieces on South African literature, a lovely piece by Pradeep Sebastian on the literary fantasies of bookish people, and a stellar short review by Vijay Nambisan of Dom Moraes' Collected Poems, and a whole heap more.
I'm trying hard not to sound like a member of the paper's advertising department, but the Hindu Magazine also has its usual dose of good stuff. Nambisan's on a roll; he also has a provocative article on the ethics of sting operations.
"I was impressed, and not a little scared, by these reporters' confidence that they were acting in the public interest and that they could tell what that is. However, it is a short step from using questionable methods in the public interest to using them in the private interest. Peter O'Donnell in one of his Modesty Blaise thrillers summed up a fictional politician thus:
'In theory Selby put the country first, his party second, and himself last. But he was fully convinced that the first two would be best served by the continued ascendancy of the third.'"
Sevanti Ninan analyses the shift in language that accompanies a change of government:
"Communalism as an accusation has been replaced by communism, considered equally undesirable by the new opposition. Hardliners are both out of fashion and out of power. Where there was saffronisation, there is now decontamination and detoxification...
There are dramatic differences now. Foreign Origin and Videshi Bahu have lost their potency as jibes and fallen by the wayside. They were demolished by an Inner Voice. Renunciation and sacrifice are new entrants into the contemporary political lexicon. But only in India would they be used in tandem with the notion of remote control. 'Low profile' is the current favourite adjective for a Prime Minister who is not only not aspiring to decorate highway arches or government offices with his image, he is barely even on television. But less complimentary Congress terms are also back in currency: coterie, reshuffles, infighting, factionalism. The BJP meanwhile has begun to use the term High Command for its own bosses."
And Ramachandra Guha's column is on J B Kripalani:
"Scholar, teacher, khadi worker, and rebel, Kripalani was a hero of our freedom struggle before he became a hero of independent India. Before 1947 he was a close, but not uncritical, follower of Mahatma Gandhi; after 1947, a sharp, but not unsympathetic, critic of Jawaharlal Nehru.
On April 11, 1961, Kripalani delivered what was described at the time as 'perhaps the greatest speech that has been made on the floor of that House since Independence'."

Fisching trip

This has absolutely nothing to do with literature, but what the heck. I've just finished five straight hours of work, and even a Babu is entitled to his fun. Here's J P Devine on the arrest of Bobby Fischer. NB: Fischer prefers to call his detention the "kidnapping".
"In these testy times, you can bet this administration isn't going to let this hot item pass. Can't you just see the Rose Garden speech now as if it were really happening?
'My felluh Amuricans ... we have not found the weapons of mass destruction. We have not found Osama bin Laden. But you can all sleep sounder tonight knowing this.
We have found Bobby Fischer, whom I have added to my list as the fourth in my 'Axis of Evil.' Mr. Fischer, international chess fugitive, is in custody and being sent, as we speak, to Guantanamo Naval Base, where he will be treated under the accords of the Geneva Convention. Mission accomplished.'
Ask yourself this in the same scenario. Will John Ashcroft find evidence that Bobby Fischer met with al-Qaida and Iraqi contacts somewhere in Europe? Will there be an Iranian connection? Was Bobby somehow implicated with Ken Lay? Did he once date Martha Stewart?"

Amitav in Dilli

Amitav Ghosh was in Delhi recently. Highlights, in the Babu's best gossip-columnist-style: he got mobbed by photographers at the launch of his book at a bar called Agni, Khushwant Singh announced we were looking at a future Nobel Prize winner, and he went through one bewildering interview where he tried to talk about his book while the interviewer tried to get him to discuss food and it was only sorted out when they realised she was soundbyting him for the Food, not Books, pages. (What the hell. If you want to know what the man thinks about complicated dals and cooking, go here.)
Indrajit Hazra, who's something of a Rising Young Turk himself in the literary firmament, interviewed Ghosh and asked him questions that--mercifully--had nothing to do with what the author ate for breakfast.
IH: The Sunderbans in West Bengal isn’t only the setting of The Hungry Tide but it actually becomes a protagonist. What is it that brought the marshlands into your book?
AG: Turning the Sunderbans into a character was part of the plan. An uncle of mine lived in the area in the Forties and that was how I came to know the region a bit more intimately than say the tourists on the bhatbhatias (launches) that ply the waters there. The Sunderbans is a fascinating place with its hidden histories. For most of it, there’s not much to see as you pass along the banks of the mangrove forests. But I discovered much about the people living there and their belief systems while I was there before writing this book.
And Rita Bhimani composed a limerick in honour of the man. No, really, she did.
"He makes your circle of reason get to lands so antique
Where your brain’s hungry tide makes your shadow line peak
It’s his charmed chromosome
With its glass palace dome
Where both Imam and Indian can find what they seek."

Heller and Birnbaum

Zoe Heller, in conversation with Robert Birnbaum. She has a lot to say about the strangeness of a writer's life, about her reviews (being shat on from a great height ain't as much fun as it might seem) and about her next book. Here's a brief excerpt:

ZH:Bizarrely very much to my surprise, I thought I was doing something rather daring—
RB: [laughs]
ZH:—and interesting and that would freak people out. No one has been remotely freaked. In fact, obviously my readership is a great deal more sophisticated and relaxed about these things than I thought.
RB: What is daring about it, do you think?
ZH: I’m being slightly facetious. I thought when I finished the book, “Oh dear, particularly in America it will immediately be seized upon.” Let’s get this in proportion. I didn’t think it would be some huge cultural phenomenon. But to the extent that it was seized upon at all, that people would think it was some kind of apologia for sex with little boys. And clearly I hadn’t intended it to be that. I remember watching an old Oprah, with Bernhard Schlink, who wrote The Reader, which is not a book I liked very much but the really interesting thing about this program was that he was confronted with this great army of women who only wanted to talk about the fact of this older woman having sex with a young boy and whether that was legitimate or not. And he was very confused. He had toured across Europe having conversations about this allegory he had written about Nazi Germany and never before encountered people who were just fixated on the moral or ethical question of whether you could have sex with younger people. So I thought that people would think it [my book] too soft in understanding a boy and a kind of hazy area of being 15 and sexually active. Certainly this country does have a kind of—and not just this country, my own country—the West has a history of both exploiting junior sexuality and at the same time being fantastically puritanical and mimsy about it.