Category: non fiction
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Speaking Volumes: When Breath Becomes Air
As a species, we suck at handling death. Except for a few evolved souls and practising Tibetan Buddhists, the rest of humanity hurtles towards the one part of their lives that is inevitable and unavoidable with a blend of screaming fear and absolute denial. Atul Gawande wrote about this movingly in Being Mortal, reflecting that…
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Nervous Throat-Clearing
Much to my own surprise, I have finished writing a book. Perhaps some people’s surprise is greater than mine, and that would be the very patient editors at HarperCollins India who suggested some five years ago that I should make a collection of my book columns. I started to collect my book columns and got…
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Speaking Volumes: How To Be A Journalist-Katherine Boo
(Published in the Business Standard, February 2012, just to add to the growing mountain of Kate Boo-worship.)“One choice that I don’t agonise about is when I write, keeping myself out of it. The reporter writing about how she got her story has become de rigeur: a lot of self-mythologising bullshit.” There is no ‘I’ in…
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Speaking Volumes: Untold stories: India’s non-fiction
(Published in the Business Standard, April 26, 2011)In the first chapter of The Emperor of All Maladies, Siddhartha Mukherjee starts with a quote from Shakespeare, and a personal story about a patient, Carla. He runs through the conversation he will have with her, and notes ruefully that there is something rehearsed even about his sympathy,…
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2010: The year’s best non-fiction
From Delhi’s courtesans and merchants at the time of the Mutiny to the search for the perfect hilsa, Indian non-fiction had more variety on offer this year than in the previous five. Here are some of the highlights—an indicative rather than comprehensive list, for reasons of space—of 2010 in general non-fiction. Business: The second-best thing…
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Book review: Beautiful Thing, Sonia Faleiro
(Published in the Business Standard, November 2010.) Beautiful Thing: Inside the Secret World of Bombay’s Dance BarsSonia FaleiroPenguin/ Hamish Hamilton,Rs 450, 216 pages In Maximum City, Suketu Mehta’s 2005 blockbuster about Bombay, he writes about his relationship with a bar dancer who grew to confide all of the details of her life to him, from…
nilanjana s roy 