Why Jesus didn't turn wine into water

It’s a myth that Sanskrit is the best language for writing computer code. Patriotic Indians have spread this lie for many years. - Bill Gates

There are some people whose books you don’t want to finish in a hurry because you know, instinctively, that your next read is unlikely to measure up.

Manu Joseph’s Serious Men ranks alongside the others in my list - books by Amitav Ghosh, Orhan Pamuk, Vikram Seth and Salman Rushdie.

His voice is so fresh that he ascribes quotes to Bill Gates the latter has no idea he is believed to have said. Well, in all fairness, it is Ayyan Mani, the protagonist of the novel, father of an acclaimed genius and resident of the BDD chawl in Mumbai who does this.

Inevitably, there have been comparisons to the driver from White Tiger. As the author himself confessed at a reading, he groaned when Aravind Adiga’s claim to fame came out.

“I was well into my book by then,” he says,” and I thought ‘Noooo!’”

But while Yann Martel’s and Adiga’s tigers didn’t impress me much, Manu Joseph’s writing is lyrical even when the thoughts he puts down on paper are coarse. Take the pages in the beginning, when the author gets into Ayyan Mani’s head, to describe the ‘long concrete stretch by the Arabian Sea’, made famous by the climactic scenes of Bollywood movies.

Full report here Sify