In brief: Ali, Amitav, Rushdie, Amitava

--New short story by Monica Ali, 'Sundowners', in the New Yorker.

--Reviews of Amitav Ghosh's new collection of essays, Incendiary Circumstances.

--Rushdie suggests sex therapy for Islamic terrorists (kidding. If you're an Islamic terrorist and you can't find a sex therapist near you, do not Googlebomb this page.)

--and Amitava Kumar, who is on the Babu's blacklist because he promised to drop in on his last visit to Delhi and never showed, has a blog--and a very fine article on textbooks:

But why is there no discussion about what school-children are asked to read in their English textbooks?
I have very little memory now of what I had read in the books used in my history classes, although I do remember the attention with which I would copy out on clean sheets of paper the line-drawings that represented the portraits of emperors. Akbar’s moustache drooped. Humayun was thin and wizened, already preparing, it seemed, for a premature death. The rounded lines in the portrait of Shah Jahan contained all the sorrow of love’s futile striving. Nearly everything else in those books escapes me at the moment.