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Speaking Volumes: The Mirror of Beauty
(Published in the Business Standard, July 8, 2013) Look for the key to The Mirror of Beauty in the dedication and the epigraph, far more revealing than most of their kind. The dedication is to “29C,...
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Booklove: The lives of successful readers
(Published in the Business Standard, July 16, 2013) The last time I saw back issues of the Indian Review of Books, they were being weighed on a rusted scale, part of a job lot of Illustrated Weeklies...
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Speaking Volumes: From Dhishoom to Banksters
(Published in the Business Standard; apologies, there was a lot more to write on the subject that wouldn’t fit into the word count, so this does read a little like an excerpt from a longer essay!) In...
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Speaking Volumes: The intellectual poverty line
(Published in the Business Standard. You can usually fit a good argument into 800 words, but this time, I couldn’t fit in all of the data: the hard evidence that […]
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Speaking Volumes: The Emergency’s Children
Memory is malleable, and tyrannical: because what you remember is so vivid, you forget how easily memory can be reshaped. Most of the Uruguayian writer Eduardo Galeano’s work has […]
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Booklove: Behramji Malabari, Traveller to the Exotic West
From Punch: Sky signs of London, 1890s. (A shorter version of this was published in the Business Standard, August 13, 2013) It would take an intrepid novelist to invent the […]
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Booklove: Freedom from the British ban
(Published in the Business Standard, August 20, 2013) The week after Independence is a good time to remember some of the less well-known achievements of the British, in the days […]
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Booklove: Dear USSR (and other correspondents)
(Published in the Business Standard, August 27, 2013) The French had their ‘petit blue’, letter-cards for the tubes of the ‘pneumatique’; Russian yamschiks or postmen were issued knives along with […]
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Booklove: The Lowland, by Jhumpa Lahiri
The children of revolution (Published in the Business Standard, September 10, 2013) It took ten days in the Lal Bazaar lock-up to end the life of Charu Mazumdar, back in […]
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Booklove: The Shadow Lines and Tridib’s Gastric
(Written on Monday, Sept 16; published in the Business Standard, Sept 2013) The most famous passage in Amitav Ghosh’s The Shadow Lines, 25 years old this year, is the one […]
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