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Tag: Salman Rushdie

  • Two Years, Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights: More hits than myths

    Two Years, Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights: More hits than myths

    Two Years, Eight Months and Twenty Eight Nights: A Novel Salman Rushdie Penguin India/ Hamish Hamilton Rs 599, 286 pages It was after the Emergency that Delhi’s citizens returned to the practice of writing to the jinns of the city, trusting in the existence and benevolence of magical beings who straddled the divide between the…

  • Untitled post 6280

    (Published in the Business Standard, April 30, 2014) In the great city of Varanasi, there lived a weaver of threads and words, who sent out his poems like incendiary drones into the comfortable world of the Kazis and the Brahmins, neither of whom had much liking for Kabir. The weaver’s verses preached the love of…

  • Book review: Joseph Anton

    Journal of the plague years (Published in the Business Standard, September 2012) A meme, defined by Richard Dawkins, is a unit of cultural transmission by which ideas spread through a network. If the idea catches on, it transmits itself, spreading from brain to brain. The Rushdie meme was born on Valentine’s Day, 1989, after the…

  • Speaking Volumes: The fatwa against reading

    (Published in the Business Standard on February 14, 2012)Among the many things forgotten about the fatwa issued by Ayatollah Khomeini on Valentine’s Day 1989 is that it did not stop at naming Salman Rushdie for writing the Satanic Verses. The author was condemned to death “along with all the editors and publishers aware of its…

  • Speaking Volumes: Listening To Rushdie

    (Published in the Business Standard, January 17, 2012) In all the claims made for Chetan Bhagat, tireless father of the Indian bestseller, this is one you will never hear: he disturbs the peace. In all the arguments made against Salman Rushdie’s attendance at the Jaipur Literature Festival this week, the gist of them is just…

  • The BS column: Rohinton and the Rat Pack

    (Published in the Business Standard, October 17, 2010. This was written before The Buck Stops Here show on Rohinton Mistry and the withdrawal of his book from the Mumbai university syllabus.) “That you say you are offended, insults me mortally. And if you insult one Rat mortally, you offend all Rats gravely. And a grave…

  • Speaking Volumes: In Midnight’s Shadow

    (Blog neglect plus backed-up posts= blogger overload. At some stage I’ll get around to posting the old stuff, but I figured I’d start archiving the more recent work.) (Published in the Business Standard, July 2008) There wasn’t much surprise when Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children won the Best of Bookers—for the second time—last week. The shortlist…