Ashis Nandy and Gurcharan Das discuss the Mahabharata (in three parts: part 1, part 2, part 3; total ~25 mins). Via Shunya’s Notes
Archive for the 'Books' Category
March 13 marked the death anniversary of Lee Falk, creator of The Phantom aka Kit Walker, the Ghost Who Walks, the man who cannot die. In Outlook, Kai Friese reprises the legend:
Some thirty-five years ago[1], the Indian publishing firm of Bennett and Coleman introduced the Phantom comic books that would fill the misspent afternoons of my boyhood. The first four frames were usually given over to the terse phrases and fragments of the perennial recap that was soon consigned to memory as I raced wide-eyed through my purple-clad hero’s latest adventures: thwarting gangsters, rescuing women, keeping the jungles of Africa safe.
It was a quieter, gentler time. I lived in a somnolent neighbourhood of Delhi called Bengali Market (after its largest establishment, Bhimsen’s Bengal Sweets). My father drove home at noon on weekdays for a lunchtime siesta. And my friends and I belonged to a cargo cult.
Those were the days of import substitution. The products of phoren that washed up on our shores were worshiped as much for their packaging as their contents, and we sniffed the suitcases of foreign-returned relatives like shipwrecked enologists. The material culture of middle-class Indians was built on a modest range of overseas products that had been marooned and indigenised as the government’s import restrictions took hold. A car was an Amby—the Ambassador, a 1950s Morris Oxford replicated by Hindustan Motors; a television was a black-and-white Telerad of East German design; a camera was an Agfa Isoly; a chocolate was a Cadbury’s Dairy Milk. As for fizzy drinks, well, Coke was it (though even that would be banned in 1977, to be replaced by the state-sponsored Double Seven).
And a comic book was a Phantom.
The son of a Muslim father and a Sikh mother, Aatish Taseer is well-placed to explore Indian identity. David Mattin in The National:
In fact, Taseer’s novel is the more fully realised of the two. We follow our narrator, also called Aatish, and also returning to Delhi after years abroad, as he befriends a brash, ambitious personal trainer called Aakash, and charts a course through the new social highs and lows of his home city.
Plot comes by way of a murder, in which Aakash is implicated; but Taseer is quick to point out that this novel’s real significance resides in what lies around the murder – that is, Delhi, in all its beauty and brutality – rather than in the murder tself.
There’s no doubt, says Taseer, that his own return to Delhi, and the shocks it gave rise to, were the fuel that powered his writing.
“Coming back to Delhi was arresting for me,” he says. “First, I realised that growing up in the city I had been blind to certain aspects of it, which I now saw: the dirt, the poverty, the casual violence built into relationships between privileged people and servants.
“But there was also shock at what was changing. It was a social change that was creating kinds of people who simply didn’t exist before. I grew up in India amid a class sealed away by the English language, by certain ideas of dress, and culture, and westernisation. And outside of that class were people who had very little. Now economic activity was changing that; you see all sorts of people developing their own ideas of vocation, and aspiration, and what should be theirs. More:
They would have called themselves Katis, but the Muslims surrounding them had for centuries called them Kafirs -- infidels -- and their land, thus came to be known as Kafiristan. C.M. Naim in Outlook:
My Heartrendingly Tragic Story By Shaikh Muhammad Abdullah Khan ‘Azar’. Edited By Alberto M. Cacopardo and Ruth Laila Schmidt. Oslo: Novus Press, 2006
One day in 1897, near the village Brumotul not far from Chitral, then a semi-independent Muslim state high in the Himalayas, a bunch of boys went walking. They were not Chitralis, but refugees from another place that lay west of the newly demarcated Durand Line. They were not Muslims, either. The boys would have described themselves as Katis, but the Muslims surrounding them had for centuries used “Kafir” to describe the boys’ ancestors, and “Kafiristan” for their original land. The British had retained that nomenclature for the portion of that land they now controlled, while the Afghan Amir, Abdur Rahman, whose invasion had made the boys refugees, had named his portion “Nuristan” (“The Land of Light”).
The boys stopped on a bridge to watch two “Sahibs” fishing in the stream below, not having seen their likes before. One of the sportsmen came over to them and said something in Khowar, one of the several languages spoken among the Kafirs. One Kati boy understood what was said; he asked his friends to find earthworms for the Sahib. Later, he and another boy carried the day’s catch to the Sahibs’ camp. The man who spoke to the boys was an army doctor named Capt; the Kati boy who understood him was named Azar. Something about the boy struck Harris as exceptional. He sent for him the following day and almost obsessively insisted that Azar—barely ten or eleven at the time—should join his service. Azar offered excuses, his mother cried, but his father, Kashmir, the leader of the clan, gave his permission. Azar became Harris’s servant—first for 18 months at Chitral, and then for two years at Peshawar. Meanwhile, Kashmir was killed by some relatives when he was on his way to Kabul—after converting to Islam—to meet the Amir and seek from him his previous high status. More:
See Kafiristan in Wikipedia:
Prof. Georg Morgenstierne travelled extensively throughout South Asia, but the most unique were his visits to the inaccessible areas of The Hindu Kush Mountains. Read his account here.
Novelist Sir Salman Rushdie, Emory professor Dr. Deepika Bahri, filmmaker Deepa Mehta and writer Christopher Hitchens discuss love, sex, writing, stories and friendship. The conversation was inspired by Rushdie’s assertion in his 1999 essay on the anniversary of the fatwa that “love feels more and more like the only subject.” Emory University.
Indian filmmaker Deepa Mehta and Dr. Matthew Bernstein, Emory Professor of Film Studies, discuss Mehta’s friendship with Salman Rushdie, her beautiful Elements film trilogy, issues of censorship in India and Mehta’s forthcoming adaptation of Rushdie’s novel “Midnight’s Children.” Emory University
Two decades of research into saris throw up some little-known facts about the versatile garment. Veena Venugopal in Mint-Lounge:
Sari - Traditiion and Beyond; Roli Books
The sari, caught in a vicious knot of dropping demand and the slow death of weaving traditions, is Rta Kapur Chishti’s life mission.
Chishti, 61, started researching the handloom sari over 20 years ago. She travelled to all the traditional handloom centres and studied the weaving, dyeing and draping methods. She chronicles this in her book Saris: Tradition and Beyond. The book also demonstrates 108 ways of draping the sari, with step-by-step graphics.
When we meet, she is dressed in a grey Ikat, draped without a petticoat, so the bottom is more pantaloon, less sari. That style, she says, is a combination of two or three drapes. “I wear the sari based on what activities I have scheduled for the day. This is the run-around and get a thousand things done drape,” she says. Draping it differently and reinventing it to suit modern-day living is Chishti’s solution to reviving the sari. More:
Mint-Lounge says The Disobedient Girl by Ru Freeman (Penguin/Viking) is one of the most compelling books you’ll read this year. Ru Freeman was born into a family of writers in Colombo, Sri Lanka.
Love in its many forms and interpretations—benevolent and malignant, sororal and maternal, instinctive and presumed—is the motif of Sri Lankan-origin writer Ru Freeman’s first book, without doubt one of the most compelling novels you’ll read this year. A Disobedient Girl is such an accomplished work that it is hard to believe it’s a first novel: At the same time, its wisdom and temperance say much for a delayed debut.
A delayed debut, ironically, is the prime motivator for Freeman’s two protagonists: Latha, a young girl, chafes at the bit in a well-off Colombo household where she is at once a playmate to a girl her own age and a servant. Miles away, Biso, a woman yet to turn 30, decides to escape a brutal marriage with her three children, and break out into her own. Alternating chapters focus on their separate lives, while delicately hinting at a shared heritage and a common need for a place they know they deserve in a larger world. More:
Christopher Tayler in the Guardian:
During the 1980s and early 90s, Hanif Kureishi’s screenplays, novels and plays made him not only a famous writer but a talismanic figure to young Asian Britons and metropolitan liberals of anti-Thatcherite stamp. Like Philip Roth, with whom he was friendly, he served as a glamorously provocative pin-up to second and third-generation immigrants brought up to be unassuming and well behaved. In his screenplay for My Beautiful Laundrette (1985) and his novel The Buddha of Suburbia (1990), pop music, sex and cultural self-invention were lined up against Tory England and suburban self-denial, with little doubt about which side Kureishi favoured.
His novel The Black Album (1995) and the story “My Son the Fanatic”, which he adapted into a movie, also tackled the confluence of Islam and identity politics. By the late 90s, though, ageing, divorce and disillusionment were increasingly becoming his stock in trade. Patrice Chéreau’s film Intimacy (2001), adapted from Kureishi’s writings, distils some of the key ingredients of the later, sadder work: forlorn drug-taking, affectless extra-marital sex, grimy London locations. More:
Aakar Patel in The News:
Last month, we had the opportunity to listen to Zia Mohyeddin. He had been invited here as part of the Aman ki Asha programme that Jang and the Times of India have organised. It’s an excellent initiative because in the absence of trade, and given that we can hardly agree on anything else, culture is the one thing we can share comfortably.
A few years ago I had read about Mohyeddin’s famous annual recitations in Pakistan. A friend from Lahore then sent three compact discs of his performances recorded at what I think were functions of Pakistani-Americans.
The recordings included an irreverent one about different Pakistani communities and their cultural traits. There was one funny story about Chinioti traders. There was also a smoothly delivered dialogue in English between man and God about the nature of woman. I had read about Mohyeddin’s readings of Ghalib’s letters, but those were not included in the recordings.
These were the sort of things I had wanted to listen to from Mohyeddin. I read that Mohyeddin had revived the more traditional style of reciting Urdu poetry. This had been eclipsed 50 years ago by the hammy style of Z A Bokhari, brother of humorist Patras. I looked forward to understanding what that meant.
The event was at the Bandra fort, built by the Portuguese in 1640, and overlooking the Mahim bay. The fort has been restored partly, from funds provided by actress and legislator Shabana Azmi, and an amphitheatre has been built in it where cultural events are frequently held. More:
Steve Coll in The New Yorker:
The Taliban’s jihad, like rock and roll, has passed from youthful vigor into a maturity marked by the appearance of nostalgic memoirs. Back in the day, Abdul Salam Zaeef belonged to the search committee that recruited Mullah Omar as the movement’s commander; after the rebels took power in Kabul, he served as ambassador to Pakistan. “My Life with the Taliban,” published this winter, announces Zaeef’s début in militant letters. The volume contains many sources of fascination, but none are more timely than the author’s account of his high-level relations with Pakistani intelligence.
While in office, Zaeef found that he “couldn’t entirely avoid” the influence of Pakistan’s powerful intelligence agency, Inter-Services Intelligence. Its officers volunteered money and political support. Late in 2001, as the United States prepared to attack Taliban-ruled Afghanistan, the I.S.I.’s then commanding general, Mahmud Ahmad, visited Zaeef’s home in Islamabad, wept in solidarity, and promised, “We want to assure you that you will not be alone in this jihad against America. We will be with you.” And yet Zaeef never trusted his I.S.I. patrons. He sought to protect the Taliban’s independence: “I tried to be not so sweet that I would be eaten whole, and not so bitter that I would be spat out.” More:
Amit Chaudhuri has earned acclaim for his novels about family and belonging. Helena Frith Powell visits him in his home base of Kolkata, the focus of his next work. From The National:
Amit Chaudhuri does not much like travelling. He finds the day before he is set to leave particularly difficult.
“I feel I am neither here nor there,” he says in an interview at the Kolkata home he shares with his wife, 11-year-old daughter and his octogenarian parents. “I am a soul in transit. You would think after 20 or 30 years of travelling it would get better, but it doesn’t.”
Chaudhuri, a youthful-looking 47-year-old with a charming, boyish smile, is the author of five novels, all of which have won literary prizes, a musician in the Indian classical tradition and an academic.
He has been based in Kolkata since 1999 after a childhood spent in Bombay (he refuses to call Indian cities by their new names, “Why should I call it Mumbai just because someone says it is called Mumbai? They might change it again next year”) and student years in London. More:
Mills & Boon has come to India, and its romantic novels featuring Indian love interests are being embraced by the middle class. Jerry Pinto looks at the genre that it is finally taking root in a country that has been modest about amorous entanglements. From The National.
He’s tall, dark and handsome. She’s beautiful, doe-eyed and chaste. His eyes flame when he sees her. She wonders if it is wrong to feel “this way”. For decades, Indian middle-class women grew up reading about men with hard thighs and women who didn’t even know how beautiful they were. Of course, they were all white people, although a Latin lover might sometimes be permitted, so long as he owned a castle in Spain.
The good news is: Mills & Boon has come to India. Last year, the world’s largest publisher of romantic fiction ran a contest to discover new talent, and Milan Vohra won it with a short story called Love Asana, in which Shioli Dewan, a yoga instructor (height: 5ft 1in; eyes: delicious warm honey-brown; hair: a rich, dark auburn mane that tumbles to her shoulders in careless abandon) finds love with one of her students, Sujay (height: 6ft; legs: long, lithe; hair: charming jet-black hair that flip-flops any old way). The catch is that he’s 28; she’s 30 and a battle-scarred veteran of the love wars. More:
Having moved beyond postcolonialism and a welter of sari-and-mango novels, Indian literature has struck out into darker, messier terrain, Rana Dasgupta writes. Is this the new lore of an agonised nation? From The National:
Novels and nations are linked by an intimate kind of analogy. If nations are the stage on which modern life and feeling unfold, novels are the form in which these things are recounted, understood and turned, finally, into lore. Such is the apparent scale and ambition of modern life that no smaller treatment than the novel will finally match up – not even cinema, which, for all its protean vitality, has never quite displaced the novel from the pinnacle of modern cultural achievement.
This is why emerging nations strive to beget great novels. During the years of America’s rise, for instance, the project of the “great American novel” was conscious and determined. Industry alone would not make the United States great: to grow beyond Europe it needed to match Flaubert and Tolstoy. In 1897, the novelist Frank Norris wrote that American writers should be focused on the task of creating the novel “which is the most thoroughly American in its tone and most aptly interprets the phases of American life”. More:
New research reveals the dark truths on the life and times of Buddha. Sheela Reddy in Outlook:
Seven years ago, when Buddhist scholar and former monk Stephen Batchelor embarked on a search for the real Siddhartha Gautama, rooting through over 6,000 pages of the Pali Canon — the oldest set of texts on his teachings, which provide glimpses into his social and political world — perhaps he didn’t even dream of the Buddha that would emerge from his research. Far from the picture we have of Siddhartha as a prince who grew up in a palace, who renounced it all and became the Buddha, attracting the rich and powerful as well as hundreds of monks and nuns by his teachings, until one day he just lay down and died, Batchelor’s portrait of the Buddha “is not that simple”.
In his new book, Confessions of a Buddhist Atheist, to be out in the US early March, this author of eight other books on Buddhism claims the Buddha was a man whose teachings were regarded by his contemporaries as not only radical, but “queer” enough for him to be denounced by one of his own former disciples as a “fake”, who not only managed to win the patronage of the three most powerful political figures of his time, but was worldly enough to survive in the midst of court intrigues, murders and betrayals, effectively quelling a rebellion within his own flock before he was done in by the ambitions of his own family.
But it is Batchelor’s findings on the Buddha’s last days that are the most startling: in the last 10 months of his life, Batchelor says, the Buddha, old and ailing, saw his two main disciples die, one of them brutally murdered, and was forced to flee with a handful of loyalists from all the three political bases he had spent a lifetime building up, until he was possibly poisoned to death by one of his many rivals, leaving a pretender to take over the community after an intense power struggle. More:
Amulya Gopalakrishnan reviews “Way To Go” by Upamanyu Chatterjee (Hamish hamilton). Fron The Indian Express:
Upamanyu Chatterjee
“For not having loved one’s dead father enough, could one make amends by loving one’s child more? That idea — an indecisive moth that fluttered out of the blue walls of the police station and circled the head of his mustached interlocutor — took time to form, glass-like, in Jamun’s head, much as though it had been biding its time to be recognised, like a scene patiently awaiting a correctly focused lens.”
These are the headlong sentences of Upamanyu Chatterjee’s new novel Way to Go. They are typical of the indiscriminate, often comical piling of description that you can either hate or tolerate about his style.
This novel brings back a familiar set of people, Jamun, Burfi and Shyamanand, from his second book The Last Burden — and the loathing sort of love that they specialise in. After years of living together, Jamun is stricken with guilt and panic as his 85-year-old father Shyamanand goes missing one day. Burfi, his estranged brother, is dealing with his own desolations. Meanwhile, the value of their family home has appreciated substantially, and is being eyed by an unethical, social-climbing builder. There is also a dramatic death, and its discovery. More:
In The Indian Express, Georgina Maddox reviews “Amrita Sher-Gil: A Self-Portrait in Letters and Writings.”
Amrita Sher-Gil: A Self-Portrait in Letters and Writings (Two Volumes); Edited by Vivan Sundaram (Tulika Books, Rs 5,750)
From the black-and-white Marg magazine that he brought out in 1972 to two superbly packaged mega volumes in 2010 — artist Vivan Sundaram has single-mindedly orchestrated the making of the Amrita Sher-Gil myth. Connoisseurs will argue that an artist as feisty and outspoken as Sher-Gil does not deserve less. While many publications on the half-Indian, half-Hungarian artist have been greeted with plaudits, one wonders if the bottomless interiors of the Sher-Gil archive have been finally plumbed with this exhaustive volume that reproduces her diary entries, letters, photographs, sketches and paintings.
This latest offering from Sundaram — who is also Sher-Gil’s nephew — surpasses anything that may have been printed till date on her. Priced at Rs 5,750, the collector’s item is glossy but lacks the frivolity of earlier coffee-table books on Sher-Gil. It also moves ahead of heavy-handed academic writing that some of the earlier books have displayed. The novelty of this avatar lies in its format: it spans her short life of 28 years (1913-1941) in refreshing epistolary style. It is a story told through the artist’s letters and diary entries that begin in 1920 when Amrita was barely seven years old. More:
In Mint-Lounge, Veena Venugopal meets Husain Naqvi, author of Home Boy:
H.M. Naqvi
You moved from Karachi to New York and worked in a financial institution. How much of Chuck, your protagonist, is based on you?
Home Boy is not a memoir, it is fiction. Chuck, the narrator, draws on my experiences but he is a construction. I guess he is some sort of an incarnation of me; he is my literary doppelgänger. First novels inevitably draw from the author’s life. So Saul Bellow’s Dangling Man, Salinger’s (The) Catcher in the Rye, Michael Chabon’s (The) Mysteries of Pittsburgh are all very close to the author’s lives. And you have this imperative to exorcise yourself especially in the first novel. And there are some novelists who remain with this imperative through the course of their oeuvre and some that manage to move away from it.
Where were you when 9/11 happened?
I am wary of answering that question. Geographically, I was close by. In the novel, 9/11, the event, actually never takes place. I want to inhabit the figurative space between the paragraphs where I don’t want to commit to my proximity to the event. It unnecessarily colours the perception and I want the reader to think of it only as a background, not in the foreground. More:
Andrew Buncombe in The Independent:
Karachi is Pakistan’s largest and most diverse city, frequently plagued by religious and political turmoil, and those headlines will not go away. This week it was in the spotlight when it was revealed that the Taliban’s military leader, Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar, had been seized by Pakistani and US operatives in a slum on the city’s edge.
But Hanif and his collaborators have a different vision of the city. Their venture means Karachi will become the latest in a number of Asian cities that host increasingly high-profile festivals, with best-selling authors participating in talks and discussions at locations ranging from Shanghai to the Sri Lankan port of Galle. One of the best known, held every January in Jaipur, is organised by the British historian William Dalrymple.
Indeed, the organisers of next month’s event in Karachi hit upon the idea after attending last year’s festival in Jaipur, which has itself highlighted a number of Pakistani writers. More:
Ibn-e-Safi was one of the great Urdu pulp fiction novelists. Detective Imran is his most famous creation and the best-selling Imran series are Urdu cult classics. The Economic Times carries an excerpt from Shootout at the Rocks, translated into English for the first time by Bilal Tanweer.
The clock struck one and Imran got out of bed. He opened the door and came out of the room. Silence reigned everywhere, but not a single light had been turned off in any of the rooms in the bungalow.
He stepped out into the verandah and waited to hear any footsteps or sounds, and then he darted into the room where the colonel’s family was assembled. Except for Sophiya, everyone had a rifle next to themselves. Anwar and Arif looked extremely bored, Sophiya’s eyes were bloodshot due to lack of sleep, and the colonel was sitting on the sofa, still as a statue. He was not even blinking his eyes. Upon seeing Imran, he twitched.
‘What is it? Why have you come here?’ he thundered.
‘Something is bothering me,’ Imran replied.
‘What?’ said the colonel. His demeanour did not soften.
‘If you are troubled by a few unknown men, why don’t you inform the police?’
‘I know that the police cannot do anything.’ more:
From The New York Times:
She was only 23, the half-educated wife of an Irish barrister, when the newlyweds set off in 1779 on a rough-and-tumble journey across Europe and the Middle East to Bengal. There, he quickly ran up debts and fathered an illegitimate child. Leaving the scoundrel, she returned to England in 1782 and supported herself by importing muslin and other goods that required her to voyage three more times to India, and once to America. Alas, no more successful at business than at marriage, she almost vanished from history. Little is known about her last 20 years except that she died penniless and intestate in Calcutta. More:
Nobel-prize winning Turkish author Orhan Pamuk is seeing Booker-prize winner Kiran Desai. From The Times of India:
During a chat in Mumbai on Sunday, he charmingly admitted that “it’s no secret Kiran is my girlfriend. So let’s get that out of the way before we begin our discussion”. He went on to preempt any further probing of their relationship, saying, “She is a very intelligent and beautiful person and a great writer. India should be proud of her.”
Kiran Desai, 38, will be helping Pamuk, 57, with his new novel which he hopes to write in Goa. All that he will reveal about it is that it will revolve around a street vendor in Istanbul who falls on hard times thanks to privatization.
This is Pamuk’s second visit to India in less than a year. But book promotions are a big part of the publishing industry, and the affable, fit-looking Pamuk can hardly say no to combining business with pleasure. And no, the 26/11 terrorist carnage at the Taj Palace where he is put up doesn’t perturb him. “Believe me, I have seen so much worse in Turkey,” he said. More:
Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s talk at the Jaipur Literature Festival shows how globalization is changing the debate. Sadanand Dhume, the author of “My Friend the Fanatic: Travels with a Radical Islamist” (Skyhorse Publishing, 2009), in the Wall Street Journal. Dhume is writing a nonfiction book on the impact of globalization on India.
Speaking to a packed hall, with her burly bodyguard unobtrusively off-stage, Ms. Hirsi Ali spoke about Islam—and its problems with individualism, women’s rights and sexuality—with a frankness unfamiliar to most Indians. She described the faith she was born into as “a dangerous, totalitarian ideology masquerading as a religion.” She argued against the moral relativism that has prevented Western intellectuals from scrutinizing Islam as they do Christianity and Judaism. She asked why it seemed impossible to have a sober discussion about the Koran and the sayings of the Prophet Muhammad without riling Muslim sentiment, and made the case for bringing the Enlightenment to the blighted lands of the Middle East and Muslim South Asia. Ms. Hirsi Ali touched upon India only briefly, to contrast the country’s success with the dismal state of neighboring Muslim-majority Pakistan. More:
Ian Rankin is in India, courtesy the British Council, as part of Lit Sutra, a programme of cultural relations through reading and writing. Interview in The Economic Times:
What made you turn into a crime writer?
One of the reasons I write crime fiction is because crime tells a lot about society. Also, a crime novel allows me to explore social, economic and political issues. A crime novelist has to have a sense of location and be aware of current events and deal with big themes and moral questions. My protagonist, Inspector Rebus, for instance, also delves into the political and economic spheres of Scotland and the UK.
My latest novel, Complaints, hovers around the huge banking crisis that was triggered recently. Edinburgh depends a lot on its financial sector. Twenty per cent of its jobs are absorbed by this segment. When the Royal Bank of Scotland went bust, Edinburgh was in turmoil. The Royal Bank CEO’s home was attacked and he had to leave the country. Although, there is a murder element in the novel, Complaints deals with this financial crisis. The crime novel allows to discuss these themes in a way that is not possible in a literary novel. More:
Abdul Salam Zaeef was a founder of the Taliban and his memoir, My Life with the Taliban, offers a fascinating if dispiriting insight into the movement. From The Telegraph:
Mullah Abdul Salam Zaeef, a founder of the Taliban in 1994 and a minister during its short-lived regime, has much to say about the wars in Afghanistan and the roles he has played in them. As a teenage refugee from the Soviet invasion, he joined the mujahideen, and a few years later was fighting alongside Mullah Omar when the future Taliban leader lost an eye.
He has written a fascinating account of his own remarkable life which gives real insight into why the Taliban was formed, what motivates it, and what it is now trying to achieve. It is what he has to say about hopes of ending the current war, however, that will be of most interest to the spooks and diplomats in Kabul, Washington and London; they will have been hoping that Mullah Zaeef would point the way towards a negotiated end to the fighting. But he does not, and what he has to say suggests that ending the bloodshed could prove extremely difficult, if possible at all. More:
Why do Indians read books? A survey by Tehelka finds that self-advancement rather than pleasure is a key motivator. Gaurav Jain has that story
Illustration: Samia Singh/Tehelka
IT IS mostly a solitary activity, unhelpful to advertising. Reading helps us sidestep the cultural demand that we find lucidity only in speed. For a long time, the quality of your reading was the measure of your character. But since character has become a poor predictor of fate, pushy books are now firmly denied access to the mind’s garret. Urban condominiums lie bursting with the plushest modern comforts, the phone directory, and perhaps a lonesome book like Bill Gates’ The Road Ahead. Our habits of distraction have vaporised an entire way of life. With the commitment to reading on the wane, the shared currency of conversations is now movies, YouTube videos, tweets and the occasional toy that masquerades as a book. more
Niall Ferguson, Stephen Frears, and Wole Soyinka kick off the fifth annual Jaipur Literature Festival. Olivia Cole reports for The Daily Beast
For over a hundred years, Jaipur, the so-called “Pink City,” was famously gray. It was only in 1882 that it was painted pink (the traditional color of welcome) in honor of a visit by Prince Albert, Queen Victoria’s consort. That sense of hospitality is apt for its literary festival, opening today. Now in its fifth year, from the start the philosophy has always been that it should welcome as many readers as possible. Some 20,000 are expected, but this is not a place with green rooms, wrist bands, or VIP areas, despite the fact that this year’s lineup is just a few starry names shy of a large constellation. more
Posted by Namita Bhandare from the Jaipur Literature Festival:
Her name was never on the official programme issued by the Jaipur Literature Festival, but Ayaan Hirsi Ali, often described as Europe’s most controversial politician finally managed to get her visa to attend the fest only at the last minute. Despite her quiet, unpublicised entry, she drew packed crowds when she spoke to Shoma Chaudhury of Tehelka on Islam and her journey towards becoming an infidel.
The author of The Caged Virgin and Infidel spoke about how the Koran is viewed by Islamic believers as a complete book and how the Prophet is infallible. “Every discussion that is even slightly critical of the Koran leads to the accusation that the discussion is a sin, that you are an infidel,” Ali told the audience at the Diggi Palace Durbar Hall, venue of the Jaipur Literature Festival. “Islam is exempted from the kind of systematic scrutiny that, say, Christianity, is subjected to.”
Ali is a prominent critic of Islam and her screenplay for the Theo Van Gogh movie Submission led to death threats and to Van Gogh’s eventual assassination. The Somalia-born author, activist and feminist has been living under tight security in Washington, where she is a fellow with the conservative American Enterprise Institute, since.
Unlike other religions that allowed for criticism, Islam brooks no questioning, Ali said. “In Islam you submit your will to a force outside yourself, to a collective will,” she said. Describing the Koran as a book written within a certain cultural context in the 6th century, she said many values are outdated. For instance, she said, in Islam, men and women are not equal, homosexual relations are not tolerated, women found guilty of adultery are required to be stoned to death, and the list of obligations under Islam have led to an environment of bigotry where believers are obliged to distance themselves from non-Muslims.
Hirsi disputed the idea that Islam is under seige. “The idea that Islam is under seige is an Islamic idea. In the name of Islam you have many organised groups and states committing violence and terrorism,” she said. “Islam in this context is a danger to global peace.”
Also read in The Indian Express: ‘When fundamentalists run out of arguments, they call you an infidel’
“It is important to off-set Islamic values with Western values. In Islam, men and women are not equal, a woman’s testimony is worth half of a man’s, and homosexuality is not acceptable. Is there a way to have a discussion with Muslim fundamentalists about Islam without offending them? No,” says Ali, who feels that Islam needs to go through the same “enlightenment” process that other religions have gone though.
Robert McCrum in The Observer:
Chetan Bhagat
A year after the launch of Slumdog Millionaire, the Oscar-winning movie of Vikas Swarup’s novel Q & A, some more quiz questions: Who is the most read living Indian writer? Is it a) Aravind Adiga (Booker prize-winning author of The White Tiger); b) Salman Rushdie (Midnight’s Children); c) Vikram Seth (A Suitable Boy); or d) Arundhati Roy (The God of Small Things)?
The answer: none of these. Two generations after independence, one of the vital characteristics of the new India is that the educated middle class who once turned to English for business applications now see it in a different light. To them, in a manner typical of English language and culture in many parts of formerly colonial society, it is becoming decoupled from its bitter imperial past.
This new middle-class audience – small entrepreneurs, managers, travel agents, salespeople, secretaries, clerks – has an appetite for literary entertainment that falls between the elite idiom of the cultivated literati, who might be familiar with the novels of Amitav Ghosh or Salman Rushdie, and the Indian English of the street and the supermarket. Theirs is the Indian English of the outsourcing generation. For these people, there is only one author: Chetan Bhagat. Who? More:
