What I want for my birthday

Last evening I wandered around in Mehrauli trying to locate someone I was supposed to interview. The cab-driver annoyed at being in dark, narrow lanes abandoned interest in the project fairly early on. He parked the matchbox and refused to budge. In the last few minutes of daylight, I saw that he had decided to...

So I finally was persuaded to give ebooks a shot and i may be on my way to being converted. On Wednesday I spent the whole day in bed reading books on my laptop. It was disconcerting to open microsoft reader and see that the library on my laptop already contained books with titles such...

I haven’t read EM Forster since I was 16 when I read them all in a fury of Merchant Ivory. From that point of pure ignorance and my dubious feelings about A Passage to India, I had to be told that my favouritest book Zadie Smith’s On Beauty was a tribute to Howards End. Now,...

Never say Kozhikode unless you want to meet Malayalees. I was on a postage-stamp sized dance floor in Jaipur and made the mistake of yelling a sentence including ‘Kozhikode!’ across at someone. (Why?Can’t remember now) Three ladies leaped at me to mark me as a sister under the skin, since I had got the ‘zh’...

Thrones, Dominations an incomplete Dorothy Sayers novel! Of course completed by Jill Paton Walsh with wonderful flair. This one begins soon after Harriet Vane marries Peter Wimsey. It fits perfectly into the two short stories that Sayers wrote about the Wimseys. Those are set in the future — one on the night that Harriet Vane...

tafseer says the only reason to read self-help books is to write another one. WHEN RHONDA BYRNE, producer of indifferent reality shows for Australian TV, created The Secret did she know what a good thing she was on to? Both her film and book have cut a wild swathe through the world since their release...

Santa Clara is not Cannery Row, a place of riotous, rollicking poverty. Neither does it have the colourful middle-class preoccupations of Malgudi. But Santa Clara is where Nalini Jones has plotted Bandra. Santa Clara, Bandra as she imagines its existence in the late 50’s to the 1980s. It is a neighbourhood you would visit with...

Yesterday I was sent to a film premiere (which finally I didn’t see because the thugs at the movie hall said that they had given away all the passes from the director’s quota; this the director vehemently denied on account of not being in Delhi to do so. I think my shoes didn’t cost enough...

I could quote Roth, great big chunks of what I just read and you would see the charm of his immaculate, robust prose. Zuckerman’s voice in the Human Stain is as sure and as compelling as your Pallakad aunt telling you how she lives her life. You can read the first chapter here. The only...

Will someone please tell me if Ed Mcbain was a fan of John Steinbeck? The seamless joining of love and compassion with cynicism… So much of Steinbeck’s sentences reminds me of Ed Mcbain. (This is an asinine comment to make but complimentary as you would know if you have heard me raving about Ed.) Cannery...

Mostly one comes to a book like WH, replete with its publicity, its lore. With Wuthering Heights if I have read any critical writing I don’t recollect any of it. I do recall that the two contemporary reviews that Joanna Russ cites in How to Supress Women Writing were hilariously different from each other (one...