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The written world
Readers will find in these essays, clues to, prefigurations of and echoes from Ghosh's book length narratives says MUKUL KESAVAN.
People
TIRBUTE
When comes such another?
RAKHSHANDA JALIL writes about Sahitya Akademi award winning poet, A.A. Suroor, who passed away earlier this year.

Columns
CLASSICS REVISTED
Cavafy's angst
CAVAFY (1863-1933) belonged to the ancient port city of Alexandria and to a cosmopolitan society — polyglot and multiracial that was wilfully dismembered time and again in history. In their arrogant insecurity, the Alexandrians created a ...


DIFFERENT REGISTERS
Journey to the limelight
A FEW years ago Mangai, the well-known director of the Voicing Silence theatre group in Chennai, had organised a play and a meeting with women theatre performers. It was a lively evening where they spoke about their life and theatre work and ...
END PAPER
Books loved and lost
The essays in Lost Classics are brief, precise, elegant. Many of them are not more than two pages; some are just a page. But all of them summon up a book, once loved and lost, almost magically.
WORD SPEAK
The legitimacy of Indian English
AT different times in the "Wordspeak" column, there have been examples and mention of the sometimes-puzzling language that comes under the generic name of Indian English. For example, the slogan for the soft drink Thumbs Up ("I want my thunder!") ...
First Impressions
READING this slim volume, many young interns and doctors will hark to their own days spent away from home for the first time. The medical school in Ireland has been host to many a young Indian doctor and surely similar stories abound. In her ...
BOOK WATCH
Amit and Amitav
SCHOLARLY studies demand method. Creativity hinges — it is mythlogised — upon madness. Can the two co-exist? Iris Murdoch wrote two works on philosophy. Umberto Eco is a professor of semiotics. Closer home, Vikram Seth almost ...
BOOK WATCH
India Wales
"CYLCHGRAWN cenedlaethol," says the masthead, comfortably comprehensible to the Welsh reader, "o farddoniaeth newydd". After this familiar introduction, however, subscribers to the current issue of Poetry Wales will find themselves ...
BOOK WATCH
Cartoon characters
IN most self-respecting Hindi movies there comes a time when the wild-eyed protagonist, driven mad, begins crying — and imperceptibly his weeping changes to maniacal cackles of laughter. Our politicians turned us into versions of this ...
BOOK WATCH
Life's a stage
IF Rupa Books' Charitavali biographies attempt, as the jacket copy claims, to make the lives of Great Indians come alive for us Little Indians, then the Greats are ill-served by these hagiographic narrations of their triumphs. "A shilling life" ...

Preview
From the blurb...
`Mumbai is India's commercial and industrial capital and is expected to become the world's most populous urban agglomeration by 2015. This book examines the growth of Mumbai through redevelopment of mill land. Cotton mills were Mumbai's premier ...
New Release
Oxford University Press has announced the launch of the Concise Oxford Dictionary (COD). The new revised edition of the COD (10th edition) has a large number of new words apart from a glossary of text messages. A large number ...
Preview
`Where do we turn when neither orthodox nor alternative medicine can provide us with remedies that work? Backed by a wealth of clinical experience, Dr. Jean Elmiger believes that neither school of thought is asking the right questions or coming ...

Book Review
AUTOBIOGRAPHY
Journeys of the mind
Memoirs offers fascinating insights into the many concerns of one of India's outstanding intellectuals, says RAJMOHAN GANDHI.
FICTION
Bad writing
Does Among the Chatterati mark `the arrival of a spunky, intelligent and tremendously entertaining voice in Indian fiction', as the blurb claims? KESHAV DESIRAJU, battered, bruised and faith shaken, doesn't think so.
ECONOMICS
A record of imbalances
A comprehensive book on development issues, India's Development Experience is also an expose of the failure of the Indian political class's performance, says S. SWAMINATHAN.
TRANSLATION
A search for lilies
French Lover is several notches better than Lajja but it still disappoints because the characters lack imagination and the story is cliché-ridden, says SUDIPTA DATTA.
CONTEMPORARY HISTORY
One man's chronicle
Feldman had no real credentials for the job he took up on himself: providing a record of his times in Pakistan. Yet, written at no man's bidding and promoting nobody's cause, it often reads like a powerful fable about the ways and limitations of mili tary rulers, says SALMAN HAIDER.
CRITICISM
Origins of a genre
THE book, edited by the distinguished scholar Prof. Meenakshi Mukherjee, brings together essays by 14 eminent literary and historical authorities who look at some of the early novels in different Indian languages. A.R. Venkatachalapathy in his ...
FICTION
Just another regular guy
I SHOULD be hearing the throb of a full-blooded Harley Davidson, filling my senses with nostalgia for a youth gone past. There should have been a riot of colours, of emotions. After all that's what teenaged years are all about. Part carefree, ...
HISTORY
Two collections
These books bring together the speeches, correspondence and diary entries of Nehru and Gandhi relating to Sri Lanka. The underlying theme is the often-troubled relationship between India and Sri Lanka, highlighting some of the issues that remain aliv e even today, says NIRUPAMA SUBRAMANIAN.
FICTION
The familiar as exotic
With its gorgeous and evocative prose and rising crescendo of a spy thriller, Desirable Daughters reads with an absorption bordering on compulsion, says M.S. NAGARAJAN.
History as commodity
THE first British trading ship, the Hector, commanded by William Hawkins, landed in Surat in 1608, during the reign of Jehangir. The Mughal empire was at its peak and drawing from his diaries and those of other "ambassadors" who followed, Philip ...
Collector's delight
DONALD RICHIE is an American living in Japan. He has made Tokyo his home for four decades. But more importantly, his name has become synonymous with Japanese cinema, and one of the first stops that anybody out to explore the nation's culture is ...
ISSUES
The search for a dream child
The Penguin Guide to Adoption, with its exhaustive appendices, is a source of credible information on adoption. And it doesn't duck controversial dilemmas, says VIJAY NAGASWAMI.

Extracts
White lies
Exclusive extracts from Amit Chaudhuri's first story collection, Real Time, published recently.

Focus
PUBLISHING
The art of making a book
Chennai-based Tara Publishing has just won an international award for its book Antigone. MURALI N. KRISHNASWAMY finds out more about the project.
The right project
Excerpts from an exclusive e-mail interview with CHRISTOPHER HUDSON, Director of Publications, the Getty Trust: Could you tell me more about the Getty and what it does? Certainly. The Getty is a not-for-profit foundation, based ...
SPOTLIGHT
Adopting a dying library
The Library of the Royal Commonwealth Society in London, which has a rich collection of material, almost had to close down because of lack of funds. SHELLEY WALIA narrates the story of its survival.

Forthcoming
New Books
Women in Indian Religions, edited by Arvind Sharma, OUP, 2002, p.272, Rs. 495. Glimpses of Indian Economic Policy: An Insider's View, I.G. Patel, OUP, 2002, p. A Lover's Guide to Warangal, The Kridabhiramamu, ...



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