But seriously...

The Hindu Literary Review for this month is up--highlights include an essay on cities in the literary imagination, Pradeep Sebastian on the lack of public libraries in India, Dilip D'Souza on Suketu Mehta's Maximum City, and Shiv K Kumar on the late Mulk Raj Anand.

From Kumar's emotional lament, an excerpt:
"Let me share with the readers his incisive assessments of Salman Rushdie, V.S. Naipaul, Nirad Chaudhuri and Ruth Prawer Jhabvala. In his letter of August 7, 1982, [Mulk Raj Anand] wrote:
"The question of Salman Rushdie's novel does not arise as far as I am concerned. Rushdie is a clever young man (perhaps too clever by half as the English say). He writes very eloquently in the English language but in Midnight's Children, he is aping the recent Americans by disembowelling his mother, painting his grandmother as a scheming old witch, his grandfather as a burglar, his father as a mere crook, and he himself as superior to all his colleagues. I suppose he is brighter than the others, but in the kind of way in which the average advertising copywriter is brighter than every other copywriter. India appears to be a spittoon to Salman Rushdie. I suppose it is as it was a vast sewage to Katherine Mayo before the war, or it is the "Continent of Circe" to that third-grade actor Nirad Chaudhuri, as it is "an Area of Darkness" to V.S. Naipaul, as it is "Heat and Dust" to Ruth Jhabvala..."
I found it fascinating that Mulk Raj Anand pillories Rushdie for the crime of disrespect. It reveals far more about attitudes so deeply ingrained in Indian readers--and perhaps some writers--than it does about Midnight's Children. I've often heard people complain about so-and-so writer--usually the good ones--that he or she hasn't been polite enough, that they shouldn't have written so openly of family, or country, or community. There was so much in Midnight's Children: so much energy, so much in the way of ferocious attachment to Bombay and to India, so much need to write a passionate draft of history as it's never set down in the textbooks. And Mulk Raj missed all that, because in his code, Rushdie was rude to his elders. Wow.