Political love

She is a true diva. She came well beyond the appointed hour. Clad in a blue salwar kameez with a bandhni dupatta, lips dark and glossy and hair cascading down, Tollywood siren Rituparna Sengupta was all apology as she stepped inside. “I was shooting in Agarpara,” said the light-eyed actress.

Of Love and Politics, Tuhin A. Sinha’s latest offering published by Hachette, had its first nationwide launch in Calcutta on the 35th anniversary of Emergency on June 25, with Rituparna and novelist Rimi B. Chatterjee attending the Oxford Bookstore event.

Tuhin read out a small passage on the Emergency. “Though the Emergency does not figure in the novel there are fleeting references to it,” said Sinha.

Of Love and Politics is a novel on three GeNext Indian politicians belonging to rival political parties. So there is a BJP MP and a CPM girl who meet at a television studio and sparks fly.

“But by the next morning they are on a different equation altogether,” said the author. Chatterjee, a novelist, said: “The ending, I think, somehow runs out of steam and there are long conversations that could have been edited.”

Full report here