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"Communalism as an accusation has been replaced by communism, considered equally undesirable by the new opposition.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'."