The Literary City

Send us Fan Mail Nilanjana Roy is the girl who, as a child, ate books — in fact, she was known to have devoured them whole. This is obviously a reference to her book The Girl Who Ate Books, a paean to writing, writers and other such pursuit. Nilanjana is, most recently, author of the novel, Black River and she is my guest on The Literary City and we will talk about her fascinating career, from her...

Send us Fan Mail In the beginning of the episode, you will hear my guest Jeet Thayil read from his book, Names Of The Women — women whose paths crossed with Christ, and who, it is said, stayed by him during the crucifixion. And after. I have been fortunate to read so many books since I started hosting this podcast. Each book is as wonderful and as compelling as the next. And then a book comes alon...

Send us Fan Mail It is said that you don’t rescue dogs. They rescue you. This saying reflects the connection we can have with our pets. Especially dogs, who are said to have had a relationship with humans for thousands of years. When we adopt a dog, we think we're giving them a new lease on life, but in reality, they often give us so much more in return. Joy, comfort, companionship and a sens...

Send us Fan Mail This interview was recorded live at Blossom Book House, Bangalore. Many years ago I saw a TV commercial that stuck with me. It showed a montage—sepia tinted portraits of older couples, with rather interesting last names: Alois and Klara Hitler Beso Jughashvili and Ekaterine Geladze (Josef Stalin’s parents) Andruta and Marie Ceausescu (parents of Nikolai Ceausescu, the genocidal le...

Send us Fan Mail There’s something primal about watching food shows on TV. Or any food show. Even restaurants that have a glass pane through which you can watch the chefs in the kitchen doing their thing. It engages your attention while they ham it up. No that’s not a pun. The business of someone setting about chopping up ingredients and turning them into masterful creations of art–truly sublimina...

Send us Fan Mail When the government exempted media from the lockdown, logically, this was to ensure that the media could do its job—which was to bring information and news to the people who were sequestered in their homes. My guest today did just that. She is Barkha Dutt, one of India’s best known journalists. Barkha decided that she was going to bring information to the people. True to her wont,...

Send us Fan Mail The ability to write well used to be a necessary qualification for high office. Whether prose or poetry, literature was important as a tool of communication. It all makes sense. The more skilled you are in the medium of instruction, the better the instruction. The highest thinkers of the realms were always great writers. The founding fathers of the USA—such as Benjamin Franklin an...

Send us Fan Mail There’s much interest of late about the Chola empire. For many reasons. The reason that looms large is the recent blockbuster movie, Ponniyin Selvan, which, is all about the most famous of the Cholas, Raja Raja. The Cholas were one of the longest running empires in history. The earliest historic references to the Cholas dates back to 300 BC and the empire was disestablished in 127...

Send us Fan Mail There’s something about Huma. Something happens a few seconds after you meet her. You fall in love with her. Now, this immediate attraction is not for the typical reasons—of which admittedly there are many. And it has nothing to do with things like innate goodness, inner light and such other syrup. Well, I'm putting it down to some “cannot tell what it is x-factor” and I’m mo...

Send us Fan Mail The way I read the book, the story is about the travails of a young Indian who must make the long and labyrinthine transition from boy to man. A difficult job when a large offset of one's opportunities in middle class India is being beholden to family, with conservative family elders and conversations in a minefield of verbal taboos. It is hard to hold down an adult conversat...

Send us Fan Mail There is an old saying, “Dead men tell no tales”. But how wonderful and useful it would be if we could follow a conversation into the afterlife? And what more wonderful than if you wrote about it and then won the Booker Prize for your efforts? Is this the stuff from which dreams are made? Clearly true if you consider my guest today, Shehan Karunatilaka, winner of the The Booker Pr...

Send us Fan Mail There is a point late in the lives of the very accomplished, when they unscrew the caps of their pens and write a compelling memoir of their lives. But how does a self-effacing journalist write an autobiography? By not writing one. Not in the stock sense, anyway. My guest today is journalist TJS George. He is 94 years old. His life as a working journalist began when he was 19. Tha...

Send us Fan Mail In the Indian epic, the Mahabharata, the central character, the fulcrum of the story is Draupadi…in my view. But epics in mythology, the Mahabharata included, are full of tales of male valour. Mythology instills in its male protagonists, high chivalry. Men are always saving women. But whenever women are warriors, they are usually fierce and angry, wreaking vengeful havoc everywher...

Send us Fan Mail What and when was the first English language novel? There are some contenders for this honour, but the most plausible for me would be Pamela by Samuel Richardson—first published in 1740 and several times since. Widely accepted as the first English novel, it is a racy, saucy, sexually-orientated story—and , of course, for that reason it was the world’s first bestseller. In 1832, th...

Send us Fan Mail Different cities have different things they buy into.  In Paris there’s style—you never want to look sloppy in Paris. In New York it’s the energy of movement—try walking slowly on the sidewalk and you’ll have Fran Leibowitz come up and say "Hey! Pretend it’s a city." In Bangalore, there is a buy-in to preserve trees. You can ride a motorcycle on a crowded sidewalk, drive...

Send us Fan Mail The great author Gustav Flaubert once said, “The art of writing is the art of discovering what you believe." I am not buying that entirely. I believe that the art of writing is to make others believe what you want them to believe. And by that, I don’t mean only storytelling. I mean all writing. Direct and compelling prose can raise even the most academic and arcane subjects t...

Send us Fan Mail History was never considered to be a subject that would lead to gainful employment and I dare say, rewarding matrimony. Maybe that’s why we have paid little respect to it in India.   Maybe that’s why our records are shoddy. Most museums and public places of history are disrespectfully maintained—and shabby when compared to those in other countries. Through the ages, the lasting hi...

Send us Fan Mail Being raised by very famous parents has its benefits. But equally, it is difficult to emerge from their shadows in which one must twist, and then find a spot upstage—for one’s creativity. Growing up in India in the 70s was materially different from what it seems to be today. Materially being the operative expression, because there was not much money to go around. For example, it d...

Send us Fan Mail Historically and traditionally, the arts have enjoyed the patronage of kings. We all know that culture broadens minds. It’s an important basis by which society finds expression and happiness. So it is in the larger common good that culture has been encouraged. It binds a society and gives it an identity. And a personality. And sets up the basis for cultural interaction with other...

Send us Fan Mail Every once in a while, you read a book, watch a gripping movie or a TV show; and you ask yourself the question, “Was that a true story?” And then you spend hours googling the hell out of it. How great would it be if you could not find the answer and not be able to reach a conclusion! As every great storyteller knows, the better you tell a story the more you make it come to life. C...

Send us Fan Mail Indians live in many skins. We deal with an extraordinarily diverse and multi-layered thing that we call “Indian culture”. There have been various attempts to reduce its complexities to something simple that represents the sum of its parts. Often, a fool’s errand, not easily expressed by say, a fondness for Bollywood and spicy food. Such cultural differences are stark when we trav...

Send us Fan Mail Chess is a finite game with finite variables. Yet, phrases like “infinite possibilities” and “unpredictable outcome” seem completely appropriate when discussing it. It begs the question, how finite is finite? Finite can be a large number. So large that it may as well be infinite. For example, they have calculated that the number of possibilities in moves and resulting positions in...

Send us Fan Mail No matter how many times you have heard it, the story of Jallianwala Bagh is terrifying. But when most of us first heard the story of the massacre, we weren’t mature enough to absorb the significance of what we were reading. As schoolboys we were only allowed a casual and dinky relationship with our history text books. Jallianwala Bagh could pass as another tale of woe in chapter...

Send us Fan Mail For those who might not know, when Pakistan was carved out of India to serve as a separate country for Muslims in the sub-continent, people on both sides—of a hasty defined border—found their lives uprooted. The tales from the Partition are many and horrific. The stories expose the raw side of a humanity filled with hatred, with mobs red in tooth and claw setting upon each other....

Send us Fan Mail What’s literary fiction? It’s not easily defined. Maybe because literary fiction is not what it is but it isn’t. Essentially, it is fiction writing that does not fit into any genre. Like crime, romance, horror, science-fiction, and other what have you genres. Another characteristic of literary fiction is that the story is driven by its protagonists or characters and not by a plot....