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.