The Literary City

Send us Fan Mail Recently Indian author, Geetanjali Shree's book Tomb Of Sand, won the Rest Of The World version of the Booker Prize. In literary circles—as indeed with other circles—awards and prizes always set off ripples of envy and carping. The cynical argument is that prizes are geared to triggering interest in markets—in this case, I presume, to sell more books. I haven’t done a deep di...

Send us Fan Mail In one of his dispatches from the front lines, in North Africa during WW2, Ernest Hemingway wrote this about Italian soldiers. When these soldiers were slightly injured, they would proclaim loudly, swearing undying loyalty to Il Duce—Mussolini. But when they were mortally wounded and lay dying on the battlefield, they would forget all about Mussolini. Instead, they would invoke th...

Send us Fan Mail Most know who Charles Sobhraj is.  But even if he has become something of a legend, Sobhraj was—by many accounts—a thief and murderer after petty gains. And not an international crook engaged in high profile art and diamond heists. Nor an international arms dealer whose shenanigans get the collective underwear of nations in a twist. Or was he? My guest today—the renowned writer, F...

Send us Fan Mail The more experienced writers are aware that the hardest thing to do is to write without trying to be clever.  Some writers are born to coruscating prose. And then there are those who can entertain readers without having to use words like...coruscating. My guest today—Chitra Divakaruni— is such a writer. Reading Chitra is like traveling in a car with an excellent suspension—you don...

Send us Fan Mail A very interesting study at Hebrew University found that the brain inflates numbers under some circumstances. University psychologists called this a “diversity illusion”. Israelis and American students were asked to assess the size of minorities—Arabs and African Americans—among them. In both cases, people believed there were far more people from the minority than there actually w...

Send us Fan Mail Forty years ago, in 1982, two young men broke into the New Delhi home of an Indian Member of Parliament—and they held him and four others — hostage for several hours. The pistol packing hostage taker, Ram Narayan wanted to bring attention to the misfortunes of exploited coal miners in a nearby state. Ram Narayan carried pamphlets of a manifesto he titled “Violence Is A Historical...

Send us Fan Mail My guest today is Scott Yanow—one of the best known and most prolific jazz reviewers. Writing about jazz is special, because of the dynamic and fluid nature of the music. There is a basic melody in jazz…but only to begin with. The musicians, in their solos, interpret that melody and its underlying harmonic structure. And always, and without exception, that interpretation is differ...

Send us Fan Mail A few years ago, I went to a movie theatre in New York City’s Chelsea, a theatre that screens indie films, to watch this new movie, Victoria & Abdul. It is a story of how Abdul Karim, a servant to Victoria, who was then Queen of England, came to be her closest confidant. A touching tale. After the movie, in the foyer, I overheard one woman asking her friend in a most puzzled t...

Send us Fan Mail My guest today is Pavan Varma. He is Vice President of the All India Trinamool Congress, a former member of Parliament, former Press Secretary to the President of India, and as a career diplomat, former Ambassador to Bhutan and Indian High Commissioner, Cyprus. But above all, in my book, he is an author of substance. A historian, he has authored over a dozen books that are treatis...

Send us Fan Mail In the late 80s, the Indian voice in English literature started to be heard in a meaningful way.  But in the early days, the writing was criticized as being imitative of colonial English, swollen and bloated, and not keeping up with contemporary usage. Either that, or it swung the other way to bring a self-referential rebellion against colonialism with cringe-worthy caricatures of...

Send us Fan Mail There is no easy definition of spirituality. There certainly is no dictionary definition of it. So I decided to make sport of finding how different people defined spirituality. But  every explanation I found was merely another shade of grey. No one really could honestly define it. I suspect that spirituality should be seen, not as a word but rather, as something that ranges from t...

Send us Fan Mail I will admit that until I had read William Dalrymple, I knew little of the history of Delhi, which is inextricable from the history of India. Although I lived in New Delhi for eight years, all I ever knew about the history of India—my country—was what was taught to me by middle school history teachers. They regurgitated dry passages from textbooks. There was no romance in the way...

Send us Fan Mail Almost every famous author—Hemingway, Virginia Woolf, Toni Morrison, Marquez and many before and after them—has written memorable short stories. The short story has long been celebrated as an important part of  literature, and in my view any effort to defend it as such is unnecessary. My guest today is Indira Chandrasekhar—a writer of short stories. She is also a scientist and the...

Send us Fan Mail The reason I use the word fortuitous in the title of this episode of The Literary City is because Sanjoy K Roy, one of the founders of the Jaipur Literature Festival…let’s call it JLF, like everyone else…told me that its success was an accident. Some say there are no accidents. You know, you dinged your dad’s car because you were careless…and not because the fates conspired to ove...

Send us Fan Mail In old Bangalore, when you drove past the airport on the largely deserted road towards the suburb of Whitefield, was a farm, with trees and chickens and stuff that farms have. It was owned by a couple whose voices were instantly recognizable as the principal voices of the English language stage in Bangalore—Arundhati and Jagdish Raja. Their farm was called Jagriti.  Today, the roa...

Send us Fan Mail About two decades ago I offered Aakar Patel a job as editor of Explocity. And just when we were all set, the famous and reputable newspaper in Mumbai, Mid-Day, offered Aakar a job as Editor and…well, of course I understood. If he had not accepted that job I would have forced him to. But you know what they say… when one editorial door closes and another…oh the hell with the analogi...

Send us Fan Mail Even a mildly curious glance at any of the millions of communities of migrant people the world over will yield something interesting. The Goans of India, are one such. They are a fun and likeable lot as far as most of us can tell. We know them by their state, Goa—a dream vacation destination for many—and their seeming love of life, which is synonymous with a state of bliss—they ev...

Send us Fan Mail The most difficult prose to write is the prose that is easiest to read. Writing on weighty matters is easy, if you are well-informed on those weighty matters.  But any honest writer will admit—in a cloud of envy laced with a silver lining of admiration—that supermarket paperbacks such as whodunits and stories for kids are exceptionally difficult to write. Even more difficult are p...

Send us Fan Mail The largely unspoken reason why so many people believe good grammar is a thing to diss, is because speaking English well is associated with privilege—the better you speak it, the more likely from privilege you must be. Shaw's Pygmalion was vitally devoted to illustrating class distinctions by language; My Fair Lady, its pithy, entertaining adaptation. To excuse the incorrect ...

Send us Fan Mail In this episode we spend quite a bit of time examining the comma. This, the smallest of literary squiggles, is also the most important of all squiggles. Not using a comma correctly could have serious implications - it could change the meaning of a sentence. It's one thing when that happens in daily life. Quite another in courts; a misplaced or missing comma could have serious...

Send us Fan Mail We pause in our interviews and other segments in this episode, to pay tribute to a brilliant mind of our times—writer, satirist and brilliant wit, PJ O'Rourke. In this episode, Ramjee Chandran talks about how PJ O'Rourke influenced his writing more than any other literary figure has. And rues that he missed the opportunity to meet and interview him. There would be no nee...

Send us Fan Mail The most enduring mnemonic of theatre is the twin masks of happy and sad. Comedy is Yin to Tragedy’s Yang. The most enduring vision of the Side B of a comedian’s personality is the sad mask. We have all heard the stories; we all wear those twin masks every day. When we are all done with the predictable platitudes of lemons and lemonades, we are all in the realpolitik. But women ha...

Send us Fan Mail How many of us stop to consider how much rock music owes to literature?  Many of rock or folk lyricists of the 60s and 70s (and into the later years) were very well read. Many were students of English literature. Here are a few examples. Jim Morrison was a published poet. Chris Martin of Coldplay mastered Greek and Latin, Sterling Morrison, a Ph. D. in Medieval Literature, Rivers...

Send us Fan Mail Most, if not all of us, who studied English in school will recognize the opening passage in the podcast…which are the opening lines from Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar. Ol' JC was in the curriculum. That passage is a favourite of my guest on this latest episode of my podcast , journalist and author, Amrita Shah. She says she picked that one to read, for its humour. When I was in...

Send us Fan Mail The famous Alyque Padamsee said that Mahesh Dattani "...had given 60 million English-speaking Indians an identity." Padamsee's trenchant comment holds much in store. Most Indians who were educated in English became—through literature mostly—comfortable in our bilingual skin; multilingual, even. And Indian at heart. In India, English is not merely a functional tool f...