Month: January 2007

I’ve just added Sarnath Banerjee’s website to the sidebar, in the authors’ section. He introduced the graphic novel to India when he came out with Corridor some years ago, and is back with The Barn Owl’s Wondrous Capers, which blends the satirical sketches of the 19th century Bengali writer Kaliprassana Singha with the story of…

One of the more pleasant surprises at the Jaipur festival was discovering the work of Tishani Doshi (previous post on Kitabkhana here). Tishani trained as a dancer with Chandralekha for several years, and perhaps this gives her a more liberating view of the body than most. Anita Roy drew her out on several subjects, and…

The convent school I attended in Delhi had firm views on How Poetry Should Be Read. We were supposed to stand “like Horatio at the bridge, girls!”, elbows out and hands clasped together, and read “with nobility in your hearts”. My only attempt at reading was a disaster.“Look soulful.”(This was hard to do. I’d been…

From The LA Weekly: In The Soccer War, he recalls how, in Nigeria in 1966, he was “driving along a road where they say no white man can come back alive. I was driving to see if a white man could because I had to experience everything for myself.” At the first roadblock, he was…

Back in Delhi, I caught up with Ira Pande, who read from Diddi, her book about her mother, the writer Shivani, at the festival. “There is something very special about reading in a place like Jaipur,” she told me. “In the small towns, I don’t have to explain who Shivani was, they know her work,…

From Salman Rushdie’s chat with Barkha Dutt: (this is reasonably accurate, but is not a complete transcript–taken from handwritten notes, so a few words and phrases are missing here and there.)Rushdie on the travelling performers or bhaands of Kashmir: In 1987, I went to Kashmir to make a documentary…. met the bhaands, went to their…

Things you should know about Diggi Palace (the festival venue): 1. It has an official palace cat. And an unofficial one that has a bell round its neck. It was apparently the unofficial one who dropped by Amit Chaudhuri’s morning session, looked up at the moderator–Anita Roy–fell in love with her at first sight, and…

I’m off to Jaipur for the Literature Festival–19th to the 21st, list of events here–tomorrow morning, in the company of a blarney of bloggers, lucky old me. (Insert alternate suggestion for collective noun for bloggers here: a bloodletting of bloggers, a bloat of bloggers…) The list of participants includes:Salman Rushdie, Kiran Desai, Baby Halder, William…

The Hutch Crossword shortlists for the 2007 awards have been announced. English fiction: Kunal Basu–RacistsKiran Desai—The Inheritance of LossVikram Chandra—Sacred GamesRajorshi Chakraborti—Or The Day Seizes YouManju Kapur—HomeGautam Malkani—LondonstaniKalpana Swaminathan–Bougainvillea House

From Pico Iyer’s New Year’s Day piece in the LA Times: “The e-mails keep streaming in, here in my little apartment in Japan, from friends in California and places farther east. The world is unraveling daily, they say; we’re going through a period of darkness unprecedented in our history. The war against terrorism is a…