Sunil Poolani of Frog Books has an interesting tale to tell. He reviewed C P Surendran’s An Iron Harvest for DNA. He didn’t trash the book, but then he didn’t exactly gush either. Mr Surendran, he says, didn’t take kindly to the review, and said so in no uncertain terms in a mail to the […]

Since I’m designated cat-sitter for The Babu and Partner, and since they’re off putting their feet up and eating prawn curry in undisclosed locations, I thought I might as well do a spot of blog-sitting too. The New York Times, which wrote about the book earlier this month, now tells us that Ms Viswanathan has […]

From Jerry Pinto’s Helen: The Life and Times of an H-Bomb: In Kedar Kapoor’s Tarzan Comes to Delhi, there is a scene worth recording, if only for the multiplicity and diversity of its elements. Tarzan (Dara Singh) has come to the city in pursuit of a thief who has stolen a necklace from a tribal […]

The Babu meant to blog about Kitab, the literary festival that took place over the weekend in Delhi, but it’s been written about here, and here, and here, and, oh, here. It’s also been blogged, by Jabberwock in what the Babu hopes is the first of many Notes-from-the-Fest posts (I’m too lazy to do this, […]

From Ian Gibson’s biography, Federico Garcia Lorca: * And then it was June. The Cante Jondo Festival was just around the corner and the excitement in Granada mounted day by day. At the beginning of the month Lorca took part in the concert that concluded the events leading up to the great event. It was […]

From Louis Werner’s Gift of Ghazals: “The Last Candle of Delhi,” by Farhatullah Beg, is a semi-historical account of a royal musha’arah attended by 59 poets, including the masters Ustad Zauq, Mirza Ghalib and Momin Khan, and their student followers. Zauq was court poet of the last Mughal Emperor, Bahadur Shah II, who himself wrote […]

From Nirad C Chaudhuri’s Thy Hand Great Anarch: “… I had a joyous feeling at the prospect of going to the conference at Patna. Such gatherings were a typical cultural recreation of the Bengalis working and settled outside Bengal, the expatriate Bengalis as they were called: the Bengali Diaspora, who never forgot their Zion in […]

You’d have to be a serious B-movie fan to remember Devil Girl From Mars , a piece of generic schlock in which a Martian woman arrives in a Scottish town in search of willing, able male volunteers to breed with other women from her planet. Octavia Butler saw the film when she was 12 years […]

(Dir: Milan Luthra, starring Nana Patekar, John Abraham, Sameera Reddy, Sonali Kulkarni and a very battered Fiat) Halfway through, Taxi no 9211, stranded on the rail tracks, meets its end in a brutal collision with a Mumbai train. Perfect metaphor for what the director did with this film. Milan Luthra has great casting: John Abraham […]

They came from different professions, but they shared much They were all women in their mid-to-late thirties; all had worked hard at their careers; most of them had supportive husbands and families; and all of them had made very similar decisions to quit the conventional workplace. Some made the decision after they had children; some […]