Slash. Burn. Pillage. Ah, Ruchir's back.

I'm not going to quote from Ruchir Joshi's piece in The Kolkata Telegraph. It would be a little like describing, in slow motion, the punches thrown by Evander Holyfield as the gentle thudding of felled bodies fills the air--much more fun if you see for yourself. But before he gets down to brass knuckles and wracks up a star cast of casualties (Naipaul, Rushdie, Dalrymple...), there's this:
Across the quarter-century that Garcia Márquez struggles, contemporaneously with other unknowns such as Mario Vargas Llosa, Julio Cortázar and Carlos Fuentes, there is only one name from the entire continent of South America that is properly recognized in world literature — Jorge Luis Borges. This doesn’t stop the marginal writers and critics from writing, reading, dreaming and banging café tables as they sit over their coffees and beers arguing at regular tertulias — the South American version of the adda.