In a fit of misplaced generosity, Peter Griffin's asked me to guest blog over at Zigzackly while he shifts house and wheedles the telephone exchange into shifting his phone lines (there's a sizeable time lag between the two events). Griff's the kind of guy who's a great guest. When he drops in at your house, he straightens pictures, rearranges furniture (he does the pushing and shoving, you do the directing), cooks, showers you with presents etc. When he drops in at your blog, people send chocolates and flowers for him (I ate the former, the cats ate the latter; that's why you got none, Griff). And they complain for weeks afterwards ("So you had typhoid and broke your leg and needed seven blood transfusions, hmm, how boring, by the way, how's that wonderful guy who was guest blogging at Kitabkhana? The REALLY interesting man? Griff? Oh, he has his own blog now, yeah, that's great, what's the URL? Byeeee.")
The Babu, on the other hand, well.... you know the kind of guest who invites three rock bands over to party while you're out of town? The one who knows the Bombay bhais even Greg Roberts avoided, and who suggests that your home might make a great den of vice? The one who eats everything in the fridge and has to be served eviction notices?
Oh well. Drop by at Zigzackly anyway.

Gregory Roberts has a resume that makes DBC Pierre look like an amateur. Roberts was known as the Gentleman Bank Robber, hung out with the bhailog in Bombay, knows jails from the inside out--and ran a street charity alongside. His account of his experiences, Shantaram, is doing pretty well. A Novel View has the most extensive set of pages on Roberts and his book--there's tons of information, presented in a groupie-meets-the-maharishi fashion that starts to grow on you after a while.
Hari Menon writes in Outlook: "Roberts eventually found himself working for one of Bombay's most powerful mafia dons, and at one level his is a gripping adventure story, drenched in drugs, violence and filled with some remarkable characters.
At another, it's an accurate picture of the expat scene in India in the late '70s and '80s. Backpackers stepping off the plane at Santa Cruz airport were less likely to be hippies seeking transcendence than people on the run in search of a good time and some business. Bombay's welcoming touts and gangsters were only too happy to get into bed with them, and not just metaphorically."
Elsewhere, Roberts was on the lam--from his own launch party.
From PN Online: "IT HAS to be a first – a book launch party where the author failed to turn up. One hour into Time Warner’s party at the October Gallery in Holborn to celebrate Gregory David Roberts’ novel Shantaram, CEO David Young was not the only one glancing at his watch. Roberts’ editor Antonia Hodgson put a brave face on it with agent Bruce Hunter, but was dismayed when she heard that Roberts was 'changing hotels'."

Bill McKibben reviews recent books on the environment for the NYRB. He's singing the jeremiah blues--with reason:
"For more than three years now, day after day and week after week, a small circle of political appointees at the EPA, the Forest Service, the Interior Department, and the Department of Agriculture have proceeded methodically to wreck the system of environmental oversight that dates back to the Nixon administration. Apart from their silence on global warming, they have overturned rule after regulation, largely ceased enforcement actions concerning pollution of the atmosphere and water, and reined in inspectors. Their work is not inspired by a grand ideological vision—it's not like Bush's foreign policy, say, with its idea of America dominating the world. Instead it's institutionalized corruption: a steady payback to the logging, mining, corporate farming, fossil fuel, and other industries that contributed heavily to put Bush in power.
The scale of this assault on the environment is so large as to be numbing. With a hundred battles occurring simultaneously and without a majority in either chamber of Congress to hold hearings or issue subpoenas, the environmental movement has been almost paralyzed. In Congress and the administration, loss has followed loss in such steady succession that even the most conventional environmentalists, usually bipartisan to a fault and reluctant to jump into electoral politics, now find themselves with a single goal: defeating Bush in November."

Every story Mohja Kahf writes for Sex and the Umma makes me imagine that we're back in the days of Dickens, with crowds of Kahf-groupies waiting impatiently for the next episode. Much more than any of the experiments I've seen over the last few years, including Stephen King's The Green Mile, Kahf's relatively low-tech ("Look, Ma, no hypertext!") Scheherazade-style story cycle gives me some of the excitement of watching a work develop slowly in front of my eyes. I've been sulking for the last few weeks, waiting for her next offering; with The Rites of Diane, I have my fix.
An excerpt: "Chand and Diane spent the entire [bridal] shower being shocked at the Arab women. Chand, a nice Pakistani girl who was supposed to go to med school after college but got married and pregnant instead, brought Reyann an elegant wedding photo album. Quiet, serious Diane, who has known Reyann since their Jersey City Community College days when Diane was a new Muslim, worried she was bordering on the too-intimate when she got her a set of breakfast-in-bed trays.
Then Reyann opens the first gift, from her irrepressible Aunt Maryam, and it’s crotchless panties, three pair, in black, white, and fire-engine red, and Diane’s mouth falls open and Chand says 'This is so not what my desi friends would get from their aunties as a bridal shower gift'."

There's a new zine/ magazine from Ahmedabad called Crimson Feet. Nice website, and no doubt they'll fix the minor glitches (the White Paper isn't accessible yet and their spellchecker missed "collabroative" and yes, I'm being an obsessive, obnoxious, anti-social grinch with a serious case of Proofreader's Syndrome). It's good to know they're out there, though.

"This absence of a general, non-academic literary criticism is the speaking void which tells us that writers, though apparently closer than ever to academics, are actually miles from them. The void is the public space that might have been. Many contemporary writers are familiar with the procedures of post-structuralism and deconstruction. They can talk about decentred texts and self-reflexive narration; they acknowledge that a text has an unconscious, and that it can be read against the grain of its author's apparent intentions. They see that Eminem's lyrics might be a 'text' in the way that Middlemarch is a text. They are often keener than many scholars to open up the canon. But they diverge from most academic critics, theoretical or otherwise, in two massive areas: intention and value."
This essay by James Wood has been doing the rounds: the man restores my waning faith in literary criticism as an honest and challenging calling.

Katharina A Powers begins well: "...[C]orrectness in grammar and usage has become an arid obsession with people of the sort who used to be stern about fish knives, oyster forks, and grape shears. You can't do anything right around this crowd. But, more than that, I finally see that the popularity of these books is a sign of how irredeemably broken down we are in language -- just as the plethora of diet and exercise books rests on our being in such ghastly physical shape." She spends much of the rest of the piece considering various conspiracy theories that might explain the sinister popularity of the word "robust".
I would have tossed around a conspiracy theory or three myself, but I'm obsessing over a minor issue: while the Babu's household gets along just fine without grape shears, we do have fish knives, oyster forks...and marrow spoons. And both the Babu and his partner are obsessive proofreaders. We correct signboards (mentally), restaurant menus (sometimes, I'm ashamed to admit, in pen and ink), television newsreaders (verbally; we holler back at them while they're doing the talking head thing on TV) and each other (we're not divorced yet, surprisingly). All the same, as readers of this blog know, our standards are very lax. We do not frown on sentences that begin with "And" or "But"; we will split no hairs over split infinitives; and we frequently switch from first to third person and from past tense to present in the same paragraph. We're not the Grammar Police, really; more like the seen-at-bar-room-brawls Grammar Vigilantes.

I love this passage from The Atlantic's interview with Brian Greene (The Fabric of the Cosmos): "I think the relationship between memory and time is a very deep and tricky one, to tell you the truth. I don't consider memory another sense. I do consider memory that which allows us to think that time flows. We all have a sense that our memory of the past was the time when a particular moment was real, and that it then receded into the past. And now we're in the present, and we can reflect back on those distant events using our memory.
I think, however, and many physicists agree, that that sense of time flowing that we all feel through memory is actually an illusion. Every moment is as real as every other. Every "now," when you say, "this is the real moment," is as real as every other "now"—and therefore all the moments are just out there. Just as every location in space is out there, I think every moment in time is out there, too."
Robert Birnbaum did a freewheeling interview with Green some months back for The Morning News: [Greene] "What physics is really revealing to us is that everything that you see is this glossy exterior to an underlying reality that physics is revealing, that is very surprising and very rich. Very elegant and very beautiful."

Hari Kunzru's second novel, Transmission, about a computer virus, Bollywood and California, is making waves already. The New York Times review called him "the entertaining Mr Kunzru" ala the talented Mr Ripley, though I can testify that he has far fewer homicidal tendencies. (The Daily Mirror conversely might argue that he's pretty good at putting the boot in; they've gone off Kunzru a bit ever since he turned down a Mirror-sponsored prize on the grounds that the group was racist.)
Kunzru talks to the Guardian about the downside of being the "bloke who got the big advance" (for The Impressionist, his debut novel), and more interesting things: "I'm fascinated by the emergence of a global class. They're highly mobile, they reject the idea of place. But even for the likes of Guy, who belongs to the elite, who is able to reap the benefits of globalisation, this has its dark side. There is a loss of contact with the local. Somewhere in the middle are the Arjuns; they're skilled, they're able to move around, even if it does involve a lot of effort. Finally, floating in the margins, are people who are almost invisible.They're picking lettuces, and serving drinks."

I'm enjoying Troy in a perverse sort of way; if the film does nothing else for you, it ought to inspire admiration for what Hollywood's dialogue writers can do to epic prose.
From The Iliad: "But Achilles would not let the Myrmidons go, and
spoke to his brave comrades saying, "Myrmidons, famed horsemen
and my own trusted friends, not yet, forsooth, let us unyoke, but
with horse and chariot draw near to the body and mourn Patroclus,
in due honour to the dead."
From Troy: (Achilles to the Myrmidons in battle scene) "Immortality -- take it! It's yours!"

From The Iliad: "As when fish fly scared before a huge dolphin,
and fill every nook and corner of some fair haven--for he is
sure to eat all he can catch--even so did the Trojans cower
under the banks of the mighty river, and when Achilles' arms
grew weary with killing them, he drew twelve youths alive out
of the water, to sacrifice in revenge for Patroclus son of Menoetius.
He drew them out like dazed fawns, bound their hands behind
them with the girdles of their own shirts, and gave them over
to his men to take back to the ships.
Then he sprang into the river, thirsting for still further blood."
From Troy: "It's too early in the day for killing princes."

From The Iliad: "There is a fullness of all things, even of sleep and love."
From Troy:
(Helen) "You shouldn't be here."
(Paris) "That's what you said last night."

Troy hasn't quite plumbed the depths in the manner of 'Helen of Troy', but it's a close-run thing. It could have been worse. They could've featured the blank-faced Diane Kruger (Helen), sighing to some unnamed Trojan, "We'll always have Paris." I know, that's pretty lame, but it beats lines like: "We're sending the largest fleet that ever sailed. A thousand ships."

The Babu hates real work, but there's been plenty of it coming his way over the last few weeks, and blogging will continue to be sporadic over the next few weeks. (Translated, until he crashes all his deadlines and people get the message and STOP making him work for a living.) Plus, India went to the polls this week, and some of us were too busy cheering when the results were announced to keep up with book-related news.

Salman Rushdie sums up my feelings on the debate over Sonia Gandhi's "foreignness" in this piece on the elections: "Those of us who are part of the Indian diaspora, and who have fought for years to have Indians recognised as full citizens of the societies in which we have settled and in which our children have been born and raised, have found the attack on Sonia Gandhi's Italian origins highly unpleasant. Even more unpleasant were the BJP's suggestions that her children, the children of Rajiv Gandhi, were also somehow aliens.
You can't have it both ways. If Indians outside India are to be seen as "belonging" to their new homelands, then those who make India their home, as Sonia Gandhi has done for 40 years or so, must be given the same respect."

Arundhati Roy offers cautious optimism, but most of this piece reads like a condensed version of her IG Khan lecture.

More antidepressants: Maud Newton on Fox News.

And all it takes is a small dose of ZZ Packer to cheer me up again.
"Like most people, Packer paid little attention to family stories as a child, but a few years ago, hearing an urgency in her grandmother's voice, she interviewed her about her life as a sharecropper's daughter. That led to research into the migration across the country of African Americans from the south, particularly those who made the less-known journey west. "I'm always interested in the gaps, the people who don't get talked about," she says."
Also this profile of Orhan Pamuk:
"There are writers like Nabokov and Naipaul and Conrad who exchanged their civilisations and nations and even languages. It is a very cherished and fashionable idea in literature and so in a sense I am embarrassed that I have done none of this. I have lived virtually in the same street all my life and I currently live in the apartment block where I was brought up. But this is how it has to be for me and this is what I do. And look at my view. From here it is not so difficult to see the world."

And if Wylie's take on how to get ahead in publishing doesn't get you down, how about this item? "...Following a year that has seen the richest British publishing houses take retailers on a series of luxurious trips to Madrid, Italy and New York to promote their authors, the smaller, independent publishers are protesting. The round of expensive hospitality junkets, otherwise known as 'freebies', has priced them out of the market, they claim.
Major publishers are spending thousands of pounds every month on 'sweetener' trips for the retail chains on our high streets, they claim, in a bid to influence retail buying strategy. The entertainment budgets involved, which can be as much as £40,000 per trip, are aimed at ensuring increased orders for their books."

Reading about the Andrew Wylie method is deeply depressing. This is what the literary agent better known as the Jackal told his first prospective client: "The most important thing is to get paid. If you get $100,000, the publisher will print a lot of copies and will make sure the bookstores put your book in the front of the stores. If you're paid less, they'll print fewer copies, and you'll end up spine-out in the back of the store. Thirty percent of book-buying is impulse buying, so you need to be in piles near the front of the store, competing with Danielle Steel. Why should the worst writers have the best deals? If enough people are given a chance to find you, you'll be a bestseller."
He speaks from experience, though. This is how he marketed Salman Rushdie's Satanic Verses: "Rushdie's books had sold well in England -- between 100,000 and 200,000 copies each -- and had been very well received around the world. But he had not done well in the United States, where fewer than 20,000 copies of Midnight's Children and Shame had been sold. As I saw it, the job was to get a company with offices in both London and New York to base their estimate of the book's potential on what they knew they could sell in the U.K.
To do that, we would start in Italy. There Rushdie's previous work had sold well, but he had not been paid author's advances that were in proportion to his sales; so if we could increase his advance markedly and place him with a stronger publisher, good would come of it. The same potential existed in Germany. So the first two sales of the book were made to Mondadori and Kiepenheuer. His previous publishers complained heavily, which meant that when I returned to New York, there was a high level of interest in the book. We then submitted it to American houses that had no partners in London, and in London to houses that had no partners in New York. Those submissions produced a maximum price, which we gave to publishers with offices in both places. We told them that we were looking to meet those combined advances with a world-English language offer. Penguin prevailed. The book's first printing in the United States was 75,000 copies. We had achieved what we wanted."
And people accuse me of being cynical about the world of publishing.

There's plenty to read on the Outlook website. Three stories of note:
Arundhati Roy delivers the I G Khan Memorial Lecture:
"While the word capitalism hasn't completely lost its sheen yet, using the word fascism often causes offence. So we must ask ourselves, are we using the word loosely? Are we exaggerating our situation, does what we are experiencing on a daily basis qualify as fascism?
When a government more or less openly supports a pogrom against members of a minority community in which up to 2,000 people are brutally killed, is it fascism? When women of that community are publicly raped and burned alive, is it fascism? When authorities see to it that nobody is punished for these crimes, is it fascism? When a 150,000 people are driven from their homes, ghettoised and economically and socially boycotted, is it fascism? When the cultural guild that runs hate camps across the country commands the respect and admiration of the Prime Minister, the Home Minister, the Law Minister, the Disinvestment Minister, is it fascism? When painters, writers, scholars and filmmakers who protest are abused, threatened and have their work burned, banned and destroyed, is it fascism? When a government issues an edict requiring the arbitrary alteration of school history textbooks, is it fascism? When mobs attack and burn archives of ancient historical documents, when every minor politician masquerades as a professional medieval historian and archaeologist, when painstaking scholarship is rubbished using baseless populist assertion, is it fascism? When murder, rape, arson and mob justice are condoned by the party in power and its stable of stock intellectuals as an appropriate response to a real or perceived historical wrong committed centuries ago, is it fascism? When the middle-class and the well-heeled pause a moment, tut-tut and then go on with their lives, is it fascism? When the Prime Minister who presides over all of this is hailed as a statesman and visionary, are we not laying the foundations for full-blown fascism?"

Dom Moraes takes apart The Last Song of Dusk:
"[Anuradha and Vardhmaan] have another son, Shloka. His parents become estranged. The father falls unnaturally silent. So does the child. Considering the general quality of the dialogue, this is perhaps just as well for the reader. I had forgotten to say that this is all set in the 1920s, for no perceptible reason except that it has enabled Shanghvi to invent a dialect for his characters. This is a mixture of English, American, and Indian slang of every decade since the 1920s, and is repulsive beyond belief, as are most of the people who employ it."

And Lee Siegel does a delightful review of an anthology of erotic Indian writing:
"This review is being written by someone who should not be writing it...there are at least three reasons why my opinion of this book should not be taken seriously."

The Babu's feeling distinctly Eeyorish today. First Blogger offers gorgeous new templates shortly after I switched Kitabkhana over to a basic placeholder version, so I'm going to have to shift style again pretty soon. Then I went off to do the good citizen bit and cast my vote in the elections only to discover that I'd been disenfranchised. (This is an improvement over a previous election, when I discovered that my father's parents, both long since deceased, had apparently cast their votes from beyond the grave.) Then I got back to find that while we have long since spayed and neutered all the neighbourhood cats , they have now introduced a friend to us. She's young, has no morals whatsoever, and arrived pregnant. Kittens are on the horizon.

It's good to know that other people have their problems too. Amit Chaudhuri writes of a writer's burden and the impossible distance between places in the same neighbourhood in this column for The Calcutta Telegraph: "Ordinary people give me their manuscripts — their novels or stories — and want me to tell them how to write better, or that they write well, or in what way they might get published and become famous, or at least read by others. But some — relatives, strangers — might ask me to fictionalize their life-stories, or someone else’s. They seem to sense, rightly, that the burden, and the material, of the writer is anonymity; not only his own, but others’."

The shortlist for the Samuel Johnson Prize--for the best work of non-fiction published--is out.

"The zero kilometer had such gorgeous hubcaps I'm surprised she hasn't been in an accident." Just wondering how a sentence in the sexist slang of the "Javads" would sound. A "zero kilometer," a reference to a car with no mileage on the clock, is a virgin. "Been in an accident" refers to a girl who has become pregnant. Girls' backsides, a favorite talking point of hot-blooded Javads, are "hubcaps." (Link courtesy The Fold Drop.) In Delhi, some of the Babu's more chauvinist friends still refer to a well-endowed woman as a "BMW" or "Bade Mamme Wale". (Bade=Large, Mamme=Mammaries). And some of the Babu's smarter women friends refer to men who use dumb carworld slang as Wickless Dunder(head)s. Work that one out for yourself.

The Hindu literary review has a lot to offer, as always. Here are some of my favourites from the new issue:
Anand on pictograms: "Another recent, surely ill advised, venture with creative pictograming was to place an image of an Indian goddess on the door to a women's toilet; it was removed after the predictable furore."
Rakhshanda Jalil on three books from Pakistan: "Arranged chronologically, the three books — Mumtaz Shah Nawaz's The Heart Divided, Sara Suleri Goodyear's Boys Will Be Boys: A Daughter's Elegy and Sorayya Khan's Noor — chart the history of the subcontinent through personal grief and tragedies and record the birth of three independent nations."
Pradeep Sebastian examines the one-book wonder: "To write just one book and stop with that seems a failure of a kind. But reflecting on these one-book writers, I realise this needn't always be true. Why not put everything you know — about life, about the writing craft, about character — into that one book? Perhaps that is how you write a really good book, perhaps even a great one.

Perhaps imitation is really the sincerest form of flattery if you belong to the Times group. Gouri Chatterjee reports in her Via Media column for the Calcutta Telegraph:
Metro twins
Same day (Friday, April 23, 2004), same headline (“Sex and the city”), same (almost) blurb (“Calcutta Times kicks off a series on the infidelity rage that’s set Kolkata on fire” as against “Bombay Times kicks off a series on the infidelity rage that’s set Mumbai on fire”). That’s where the similarities began. The text of the “stories” in both papers was identical — except for one difference. Calcutta Times’s “Raghav, a south Kolkata boy” is “Ryan, a south Mumbai boy” in Bombay Times, Karan Sen is Karan Singh, Amit Datta Amit Patel, and so on. Whatever their names, the people in Calcutta and Mumbai were evidently separated at birth, they think, act, speak just like each other. May be, The Times of India believes what Calcutta thinks today, Bombay thinks the same day (or vice versa). Or it could be the other cliché: what’s in a name… Or, it could be the business-savvy TOI’s way of achieving economies of scale, journalism go hang.

Nell Freudenberger did a reading at the local Barista in Defence Colony, where the earth moved for her audience. More or less literally; the Corner Bookstore is perched on the second floor of a building that judders every time a car passes by, and you don't want to know what it feels like when the milk truck's doing its rounds. The Literary Saloon at the Complete Review has a roundup of the media response in India. They were glad (or not!) to see that their own views tallied so exactly with Rajeshwari Sharma's considered opinions.
This is what Sharma wrote in the Economic Times:
"Unlike Freudenberger, her girls are more jittery than lucky. Largely from affluent families,
they live in — or are at least exposed to -- the whole wide world, and still find themselves
at sea. Set in South East Asia and India, the stories revolve around young women, who
find themselves, often as expatriates, face to face with the compelling circumstances of
their relationships. Their dysfunctional families make for damaging environments in which
they struggle, to differing extents (and largely unsuccessfully), to find a hold."
This is how the Complete Review's review of Lucky Girls, published long before the Economic Times report, began:
"Nell Freudenberger's girls are more jittery than lucky in this collection of five stories.
Largely from privileged backgrounds, they live in -- or are at least exposed to -- the
whole wide world, and still find themselves at sea. Their damaged families make for
damaging environments in which they struggle, to differing extents (and largely
unsuccessfully), to find a hold."

"When Adolf Hitler killed himself in his Berlin bunker on 30 April 1945, the news took some time to travel. Eight confused days followed, until the German Wehrmacht finally capitulated. Joachim Fest, then 18 years old, heard about it in a PoW camp in Laon, France, after having been taken prisoner by the US Army at the famous Remagen bridge.
He still pictures the scene vividly. "There was a large crowd in front of the camp notice board, and some jostling was going on. Someone said, with a sigh: 'Thank God, he's dead, and the war's over.' Others disagreed: 'How can you say that? It's the Führer!' Ear-boxing was in the air." Then, Fest remembers, an older soldier came along, hands in his pockets, and quite lax in his manner: "'Stop quarrelling,' he told the young PoWs. 'It was madness, not just the end. It was madness right from the start.'" This set the tone, and the crowd dissolved."
The Independent interviews Joachim Fest, former PoW, now perhaps one of the most respected historians of the Third Reich.

Two brilliant interviews with two outstanding writers, Jenny Diski and ZZ Packer. (From The Telegraph.)
Jenny Diski: "Books are available for us to play with. I wanted to retrieve the Bible from stupidity, to take it back as an "essentially human story."
ZZ Packer: For me to use the places in which I've lived is a way of revisiting them, but not to have to visit them from my point of view."

John Banville revisits Milan Kundera's The Unbearable Lightness of Being. "Returning after 20 years to what is acknowledged as a modern classic, I was struck by how little I remembered. As I began re-reading The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Milan Kundera's novel of love and politics in communist-run Czechoslovakia between 1968 and the early 1980s, I realised that, true to its title, the book had floated out of my mind like a hot-air balloon come adrift from its tethers. I managed to retrieve a few fragments - the naked woman in the bowler hat whom we all remember, the death of a pet dog, a lavatory seat compared to a white water lily rising out of the bathroom floor, and the fact that Nietzsche's name appears in the first line on the first page - but of the characters I retained nothing at all, not even their names."
The Babu is no Banville, but we do have this in common: a tendency to forget, sometimes to our own surprise, a work that should have been indelibly imprinted on memory. This trait made my definition of a classic gloriously simple, though: a classic was a book that I was tempted to return to, only to discover how much more there was in the book that had not been retained in my memory. It was a different version of that first fine careless rapture, a recovery of experience with more intensity involved the second time around. Books that fell short of classic status did exactly the opposite: I returned to them in great expectation only to be disappointed by the absence of memorable detail, the lack of characters whom I might greet with the affection you reserve for old friends who have dropped out of sight.

Farrukh Dhondy, official defender of the Naipaul faith. He shouldn't bother when Naipaul summarises his own argument thus: "When the subject cropped up at last, Naipaul kept his cool. Dalrymple's evidence of cultural hybridisation was shaky, tendentious; clearly it had been influenced by left-wing academics. The Moguls systematically destroyed Hindu culture. The fact that a few monuments survived, that there was some mingling of architectural styles, one of Dalrymple's principal points, is neither here nor there. It's like saying that the Nazis left some things intact in occupied France." This is such a gross misreading of Indian history that it would be barely worth rebutting--if it weren't for the fact that you don't expect a Nobel laureate to produce such a half-baked perspective.
There's an interesting article in Himal on the historian Romila Thapar: while it covers a slightly different debate, this section is worth re-reading, in the light of Sir Vidia's views.
"Professor Thapar has looked at a variety of cultural traditions in the making of ancient India. To the petitioners Indian past is monolithic, unified and unmistakably only Hindu. Those who disagree with this notion are accused of committing cultural genocide.
The fact is that Romila Thapar has been pointing out for more than three decades that the historical theories expounded by the Hindutva club are a jump backwards to the assumptions of 19th century colonial history.
In February 2003, in delivering the Athar Ali Memorial Lecture at Aligarh Muslim University, she elaborated on this theme again:
"The colonial interpretation was carefully developed through the nineteenth century. By 1823, the History of British India written by James Mill was available and widely read. This was the hegemonic text in which Mill periodised Indian history into three periods – Hindu civilisation, Muslim civilisation and the British period. These were accepted largely without question and we have lived with this periodisation for almost two hundred years. ... Mill argued that the Hindu civilisation was stagnant and backward, the Muslim only marginally better and the British colonial power was an agency of progress because it could legislate change for improvement in India. In the Hindutva version this periodisation remains, only the colours have changed: the Hindu period is the golden age, the Muslim period the black, dark age of tyranny and oppression, and the colonial period is a grey age almost of marginal importance compared to the earlier two."
Naipaul's version of history is almost exactly the same as the version Thapar calls "the Hindutva version". He may have arrived at his reading of history by making a different journey, but the destination is the same.
Professor Thapar provides a more elaborate reading of Indian history here.

"Helen Fielding has much to answer for, not least clones of Bridget Jones that haunt not just her own sequels but of every wannabe writer wanting a self-deprecating heroine with oodles of SA and not near enough common sense..."
"Okay, so no big deal, TDH is welcome to do her bit for feel-good India with a everyone-loves-India-so-it must-be-a-good-thing-too, and where’s the harm in a wannabe writer typing out her 17-year-old life’s story on a keyboard using dashes in lieu of quote marks to mark the advent of another IWE (that’s Indian Writer in English, in case you didn’t know)?" Kishore Singh, scalpel firmly in hand, reviews Tanuja Desai Hidier's Born Confused. (Be warned that links on the Business Standard site change with alarming rapidity.)

"An independent writer should be willing to be relatively poor for much longer than most professionals." In the age of the mammoth book advance, Ravi Vyas points out that most Indian authors shouldn't expect to earn much from their labours.

"The closest I can get to describing Ram Guha is that he is an intellectual entrepreneur. He might well have become an economist, joined the Bank and showered advice on the poor of the world. But he became a Marxist and went to Calcutta to empower the poor. The Marxist research institute he joined there was very good; it cured him of Marxism — though not of Marx, whom he here calls 'the forerunner and inspirer of the greatest social theorist of them all, Max Weber'." From The Calcutta Telegraph, a late but welcome review.