Imran Khan's book recalled in India

Pakistani cricketer-turned-politician Imran Khan's new book has become the latest publication to trip over the cartographic tangle of the India-Pakistan border.

Publisher Random House has recalled all advance copies of the book in India and delayed its release here due to errors in a map of the two countries at the time of the Partition, which wrongly showed Pakistan-occupied Kashmir shaded in the same colour as that of Pakistan.

Titled Pakistan: A Personal History, the book was launched in the United Kingdom over the weekend, but was scheduled to be released in Indian bookshops on Wednesday. Advance copies had already been sent to the media for review. However, on the scheduled date of release, Random House recalled the 30-odd advance copies, reportedly due to the errors in the map.

Sources at the publishing house say the book is now likely to be released next week after the offending pages are replaced with a map that India considers accurate.

Full report here Hindu

DSC Prize 2012 Longlist announced

The longlist for the DSC Prize for South Asian Literature for 2010 was announced in Delhi today. There are 16 books on the list.

The list has both established as well debut novelists. There are also three translated entries. The five member jury each selected three works, revealed jury member Ira Pande. She said the list includes works from South Asia's cultural diversities as well as books that reflect urban as well as rural landscapes. There are two books on Afghanistan.

The shortlist will be announced on October 24 at the Shakespeare Globe in London, while the $50,000 prize will be given during the Jaipur Literature Festival in January 2012.

"I am delighted that the DSC Prize is able to provide a global platform to recognize such fine works and present them to a wider audience," Manhad Narula of DSC said.

The longlist:
Omair Ahmad: Jimmy the Terrorist (Hamish Hamilton/Penguin India)
U.R. Ananthamurthy: Bharathipura ( Oxford University Press, India, Translated by Susheela Punitha)
Chandrakanta: A Street in Srinagar (Zubaan Books, India, Translated by Manisha Chaudhry)
Siddharth Chowdhury: Day Scholar (Picador/Pan Macmillan, India)
Kishwar Desai: Witness the Night (HarperCollins/HarperCollins-India)
Namita Devidayal: Aftertaste (Random House, India)
Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni: One Amazing Thing (Hamish Hamilton/Penguin India)
Manu Joseph: Serious Men (Fourth Estate/HarperCollins, India)
Usha K.R: Monkey-man (Penguin/Penguin India)
Shehan Karunatilaka: Chinaman (Random House, India)
Tabish Khair: The Thing About Thugs (Fourth Estate/HarperCollins-India)
Jill McGivering: The Last Kestrel (Blue Door/HarperCollins-UK)
Kavery Nambisan: The Story that Must Not Be Told (Viking/Penguin India)
Atiq Rahimi: The Patience Stone (Chatto & Windus/Random House-UK, Translated by Polly McLean)
Kalpish Ratna: The Quarantine Papers (HarperCollins-India)
Samrat Upadhyay: Buddha's Orphan (Rupa Publications, India)

Lunch with BS: Chiki Sarkar

One of Indian publishing’s most visible faces talks about spotting great authors and her new job.

This is all a bit fraught. The day is hot, I’m getting late, she’s on time but the restaurant she picked is unexpectedly closed, she decides on another, a new place named Lah! three floors up from a tiny side lane in Hauz Khas Village, which passersby have not yet heard of and cannot offer directions to...

So, 15 minutes late, Rrishi Raote falls into a seat across from Rudrani “Chiki” Sarkar, lately Editor-in-Chief of publisher Random House India and now Publisher of Penguin India. Lah! is thankfully restful to begin with, isolated as it is near the rooftops, a single dim and cool room with deep green walls and a shiny floor.

Sarkar has studied the menu, so she orders for us both. Hers is a complicated-sounding noodle bowl with corn, black mushrooms, chicken and lamb, flat noodles and “soy garlic cilantro”. (Noodles? I think, impressed — isn’t that reckless, because potentially messy, for a working lunch?) Mine is a Malay chicken curry with rice. This will be washed down with beer.

Sarkar is, for an Indian publisher, an unusually visible figure, being quoted, written about and writing off and on in papers and magazines. In part the prominence is inherited – her father is Aveek Sarkar, whose family controls the Kolkata-headquartered media company ABP Group – but it also comes from the way she shaped Random House India and its publishing programme, the way she has made media-ready celebrities of her debut authors and commanded coverage on a scale not thought of by Indian publishers.

The myth meister

The author weaves another engrossing yarn, all the while addressing some of his perennial concerns about human life and expression

Luka and the Fire of Life
Salman Rushdie
Jonathan Cape
Rs 915; Pp 216

Nearly two decades ago, Salman Rushdie wrote a novel while he was in hiding after Iran’s supreme leader Ayatollah Khomeini declared a fatwa on him, over his novel, The Satanic Verses. That delightful novel was Haroun and the Sea of Stories, an in-your-face response, showing that he could not be silenced and he would not disappear into oblivion.

There, a little boy called Haroun travels to the source of all stories to restore the gift of gab, which his father, Rashid Khalifa, had lost. It dazzled readers, even as it had a particular poignancy and relevance—it was a stirring defence of free speech—of arguments, talkativeness, and verbal anarchy, against khatam-shud, or silence, the dark place where only one voice could speak. Rushdie had written that novel for his son Zafar, who was, to borrow a word Rushdie coined in Midnight’s Children, “nearlynine” at the time of the fatwa.

With Luka and the Fire of Life, Rushdie returns to the Khalifa family. Written for his second son, Milan, who is now 13, the story is about Haroun’s brother, Luka, who is determined to help his father. The Shah of Blah, as Rashid Khalifa is known, is back, but only just: He is ill; life is seeping out, and tubes sustain him by feeding him and people worry around him. Twelve-year-old Luka has to complete a hair-raising journey through the world of magic, and in a nod to the Promethean myth, he must bring the fire of life to the earth, to revive his father.

Full review here Mint

Life on her own terms

This novel may be set in Mumbai but definitely makes you recall chapters from your life and that of your friends.

Two best friends, living in with a boy who is protective, a job to die for and bosses who can't take their eyes off her; this is Laila's life. Sexy, hot and suave Laila has a job that suits her extroverted personality.

After finishing her schooling in Manhattan, Laila takes up a job at a magazine Guyzone and dons the role of a sex expert for her new column. Wherever she is, she always manages to attract men...

The plot
After breaking up with her boyfriend who has been cheating on her, she decides to stay away from relationships.

Her roommate is a freelance photographer, and he soon becomes a part of the Guyzone anniversary edition. Laila knows her strengths and weaknesses and soon becomes the centre of attraction even at her workplace.

Full report here Hindu

Mythical icons become heroes in new Indian fiction

Rama, Ravana, Arjuna, Jesus Christ, Lord Shiva, Ganesha and the epics are becoming fodder for contemporary Indo-Anglian literature. Writers say it is a new way of looking at Indian culture and draw young readers.

The reprint of two popular titles - The Immortals of Meluha by Amish Tripathy and The Rozabal Line by Ashwin Sanghi last month - brought the gods back from their heavenly abodes to play action games on earth. The books have been published by Westland Ltd.

Amish Tripathy re-tells a folkore from Jammu and Kashmir about the descent of Lord Shiva in his blue-neck Neelkantha avatar from Tibet with his warriors to Meluha, a modern-day Indus Valley city located in Srinagar, to save the city. Sanghi spins a murder mystery around the supposed grave of Jesus Christ at the Rozabal shrine in Kashmir.

Three new fiction tomes - The Ganesh Scripture by Alice Albina, The Golden Sacrifice of the Mahabharata by Maggi Lidchi Grassi and Kalika and Dimna: The Panchatantra Retold by Ramsay Wood - published by Random House this year use Ganesha, Vyasa, Arjuna and mythical demons to narrate gripping stories.

Full report here Economic Times

Money all the way

A family saga, sometimes entertaining, sometimes flagging in energy...

The author of Music Room, Namita Devidayal revisits readers with her second novel Aftertaste, a long engagement of a business family's deep obsession with wealth and abject genuflection in the presence of money and jewellery. The narrative then threads through a saga of resultant folly of greed and the associated toxins that set in with familial relations, where much is compromised ethically.

Themes
The central and recurring leitmotif in the story is money (at times tad overstated). “Money has a mind of its own….like a river it takes its own course. If you try and control it, at some point the bund breaks and the water flows where it wants to.” Aftertaste traces the saga of the Todarmal family's control and flow with the forces of money. Daddyji and Mummyji's lives alternately revel in the scent of wealth or grapple with the vicissitudes of dwindling fortunes. In one dark and down moment Mummyji strikes upon the idea of setting up a Mithai shop as a business venture. Their two sons Rajan Papa (the older, stodgy, feeble- willed) and Sunny (the younger impatient one) join the family trade. The daughters Suman (the beautiful, spoilt one) and Saroj (the younger, reticent one) feed off the family business in more ways than one.

Full report here Hindu

Food for thought

Enid Blyton has been the founding stone on which several writers have built their careers and it was no different for Namita Dayal. “I think I have always enjoyed creating and exploring different worlds and making up stories in my head,” says Namita, about a habit that was probably supplemented by all the Amar Chitra Kathas and Enid Blytons that dominated a large portion of her staple reading diet.

Namita was in town for the launch of her latest book, Aftertaste in Landmark. . Set in the 60's, this book follows the drama around a dysfunctional joint family on the verge of bankruptcy. The book is fiction with features Namita has stolen from real life.

Namita had an upbringing that balanced her parallel lives with precision; a modern school and western standards of education with a very traditional gurukul world of Hindustani classical music, and it was in this miraculous world of classical music she found her first book, The Music Room, which Pandit Ravi Shankar called a must read for every musician and music lover.

Full report here Hindu

Money, mithai and Mummyji

Mere paas ma, mithai aur money hai – could have been the sub title of Namita Devidayal’s Aftertaste, a riveting tale of a dysfunctional bania family. The Todarmal’s mithai business has been their personal route to salvation and appeasement to the gods of money. Only for the dysfunctional brood, by the second generation, none of this seems to have helped much.

Aftertaste
Namita Devidayal
Random House
Rs 399; Pp 292

Commerce and literature have not really been the best of friends, especially in India. While most Indians worship wealth in some ways, few have taken it to the levels of sophistication that the bania community has. With bahikhatas rather than books as their favoured written content, not many outside bothered to decipher the social mores of this community beyond perceiving them to be sharp traders with a reputation for tightfistedness. Just Neelima Dalmia Adhar's Merchants of Death and Himani Dalmia's Life is Perfect come to mind.

Devidayal upholds the stereotype – the Todarmals are migrants – from Punjab to Bombay of the early 1960s, they are innovative in their business, they follow business practices not taught at MBA courses, and business, family and honour are intermingled in a tangled web – and none can be disturbed without impacting the others. Money is a character in itself. “Money has a mind of its own, which is what a clever businessman should realize, though most do not… Above all money despises arrogance. And that was the price Daddyji was paying for his vanity.” Daddyji’s standing in as a guarantor for cousin Phoolchand provides the catalyst for the family’s fortunes to dip, and till Mummyji comes up with the idea of selling mithai, there is little for Daddyji to do in their world of honour-driven enterprise.

Along with the parents and the four siblings – Rajan Papa, heir to the throne, ineffectual and forever in need of Mummyji; Sunny, brash, unwilling to settle for a settled business, and with a complicated personal life; fair Suman, the arrogant princess and forever-in-the-shadows younger daughter Saroj – there are a host of minor characters who bring alive this fairly insular world. “One day slipped into another but nothing changed for the family. Newspapers carried monumental news about China accusing India of supporting Tibet and the city of Bombay being split into two states, Maharashtra and Gujarat. But for most people, there was very little interest in such distant issues. The only thing that mattered for families such as the Todarmals was the ebb and flow of money.”

Devidayal seems to have been drawn to the quirkiness – it is money that determines that Saroj should no longer stay with her husband, out of favour in his own family, and therefore unlikely to inherit anything substantial. It is again money that ensures that Mummyji takes no stand even when Bhatija keeps her supplied with money but not Rajan Papa, putting his life in considerable turmoil. Suman’s overt spiritual meetings to overcome material needs is amusingly contrasted with her covert greed for Mummyi’s legendary diamonds. The Todarmals may not be lovable, their life story certainly makes for an entertaining read. The author brings alive facets of how the family dynamics works, complete with insecurities and jealousies – when Daddyji decides to name their shop in Kalbadevi ‘Bimmo di barfi’, Mummyji’s first thought is one of pleasure as the move would undoubtedly annoy her mother in law. The mother fixation, common to Indian males well beyond the community under spotlight here, finds ample play.

Equally noteworthy are the detailed period descriptions of Bombay of the 1960s and 70s. Descriptions of Kalbadevi, where “most of the business was conducted on gaddis...” to the shadowy lives of clubs, hash, discos. “The conservative party bleated relentlessly about propriety, sobriety, fidelity, and modesty, but Bombay winked back and did exactly the opposite. It was bad and it was really good.” The novel begins with Mummyji in hospital, and is in flashback. All the lead characters get enough space for their back stories.

A delightful blend of lyrical prose and gossip, strategies and insecurities, ambitions and limitations, desires coupled with frustrations, of families doing business by the old codes hesitantly under question.

Devidayal’s love for music seems to have spilled over from the first book, the part biographical The Music Room. So their uncle Phoolchand, actually Mummyji’s distant cousin and Daddyji’s close friend, sought out the young Ameer Khan, while “Geeta Dutt’s chirpy songs would forever remind them of those miserable days” cooped up in their home, the optimistically named Cozy Villa. Songs from Aradhana play in the backdrop, while Lata Mangeshkar sang at Birla Matoshri at a fund raiser for Bangladesh war veterans. It is food however that becomes the theme and the metaphor for the dysfunctional lives. Hot jalebis, crisp phaphda, pitthi puris with rasse wale aloo, kachoris, fresh barfis, Bimmo di barfi and later avatar, Bimz had it all and more when Mummyji had the idea of customizing – from Bournvita barfis to sweets shaped as company logos, her ideas kept taking their reputation, and wealth, forward. Almost every domestic situation has food, if not as its central focus, at least on the peripheries. Weight watchers, beware. For readers who have inadvertently picked up this book – there is no way you are going to be able to not accompany the reading with some of the delectable Bimz mithai, or its equivalent nearest mithaiwala around the corner.

BLURB
“Their families belonged to the trader community–the banias–known for their formidable business acumen, where the boys were taught their multiplication tables in quarters. At some point, they may or may not have come from Marwar in Rajasthan but, over the years, they had dispersed all over the country, following the smell of money. The Todarmals had long adopted the language, food, and dress of their adopted home in Punjab. Yet, their identity was bania first and they continued to intermarry within this diasporic business community.”
Page 28 


Full review in Business India

Savouring the ordinary

As anyone interested in books and reading would know, the past decade and a half has seen a plethora of books by young Indian authors writing in English. And if they're not writing about the mind-numbing details of what goes on in that peculiarly twenty-first century phenomenon; the call centre, they're writing about the Great Indian Family with all its hierarchies, idiosyncrasies and traditions. With a few exceptions, these families are almost exclusively north Indian - and by that I mean Punjabi, confined to the socio-geographical space of Delhi, Punjab and Haryana. Namita Devidayal's Aftertaste is no exception.

Set in the Bombay of the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s, Aftertaste focuses on the Todarmal family - Daddyji, the family patriarch, Mummyji, the matriarch who reigns supreme and runs the family, ordering her children and husband's lives around like pawns on a chessboard and their children - Rajan Papa, the eldest, forced to grow up early and shoulder familial and business responsibilities, Suman, spoilt, eternally discontented, beautiful and greedy, Saroj, dark, shy and a bundle of insecurities and finally Sunny, the youngest, who never quite grew up. The family fortunes are centred on the thriving sweet shop they own in Kalbadevi, Bimmo di Barfi (later shortened to the more modern 'Bimz' by Sunny) - named after Mummyji as a tribute to her position in the family as well as the fact that without her brainwave and enterprise, the shop would never have seen the light of day.

Full report here Businessworld

Sweet and sour family feuds

Some novels are worth reading simply because you learn so much from them. About a city, or a community, or a group of people, or a certain kind of business. About the food, the clothes, the social practices, even the sexual urges of that group. Namita Devidayal's Aftertaste is one of those novels.

That's not to say the story doesn't take you along on its own strength. Despite some early buzz about its being modelled on the relationships and faultlines between the three Ambanis - Dhirubhai, Mukesh and Anil - its canvas is far more modest: the lives of a business family of mithaiwallahs. Sure, there are a few superficial coincidences - in Devidayal's book, too, there are feuding brothers and the death of the person who controlled the business. But superficial is the operative word.

The story, on the face of it, is about how Mummyji, the matriarch of the family, built up a sizeable business - first inspiring and goading her husband and, then, taking over the reins herself after his death; and about how both her sons - and daughters, and everyone whose lives revolved around her in one way or another - prove weak and, in their own respective ways, avaricious. Using an innovative structure that starts with the matriarch’s collapse and then recounts the events leading up to it - going far back into personal histories - Devidayal tells an absorbing story that sucks you in just like the oversweet syrups coating the sweets she describes in loving detail.

full report here IBNLive

Surging ahead

Former national swimming champion, journalist and author Geeta Anand talks about her book The Cure, and her journey so far

Geeta Anand is the Mumbai-based much-feted author of The Cure, (published by Random House) a riveting book that tells "the true story that inspired the movie 'Extraordinary Measures'". It stars the redoubtable Harrison Ford, but Geeta is no mere speck in the distance, or the quiet author who wrote the book and faded into anonymity.

Now a senior writer with the Wall Street Journal, Geeta has done a lot of things, and all, her own way. Once a national swimming champion, she now makes a splash with her pen. "I set out to write a book that will have a strong narrative, not an academic book that would bore people. I covered bio-tech as part of my journalistic beat. I wrote on pharmaceuticals too, and came across John Crowley on my beat. I wrote a story on him back in 2001, and a couple of articles. I found the story rich, fascinating, with so much drama, intrigue, that I had to have it as a book."

So, her journalistic credentials helped shape the book? "Well, I used the same set of skills, the same channels, but, while writing the book I had to learn to be slow. I realised it is a different type of writing. When I sent my first draft to the publishers, my editor asked me to make it twice as long. He told me the reader needed to slow down, ponder, reflect; he needed detailing. So, I worked on that, but I was always certain that the book has to have a certain kind of momentum."

Full report here Hindu

Ties that gag and bind

A member of a traditional business family writes her second novel, about a dysfunctional family in the mithai business. Gita Piramal is no stranger to this milieu, and she explores its unique dynamics

A novel deserves to be read only if it helps us discover a facet of ourselves or reminds us of a universal truth.

In the airport action thriller genre, Jeffrey Archer’s latest book, A Prisoner of Birth, traces the journey of an underprivileged football-mad lad who overcomes his enemies. He gains the upper hand by investing in himself. He finds a fellow jailbird who teaches him to read. This kickstarts a programme of self-education.
The stupendous global success of J K Rowling’s Harry Potter series lies in the exploration of our deepest and most secret fears. Children and adults alike find comfort in reading that others too are prey to similar anxieties.

Before I come to the exploration within Aftertaste, Namita Devidayal’s second novel, let me tell you its outline. The novel opens in the mid-1970s and ends in 1984, the year Indira Gandhi was assassinated after the assault on the Golden Temple. In Bombay (as the city was then called), a Punjabi family of two parents and four children is struggling with bankruptcy. Mummyji steps in to save the day with her cooking. A mithai empire is born.

The father dies. Mummyji holds her family together with bribes of money, endless food and adoration. Her eldest son, Rajan Papa, is weak and ineffectual, and short of cash. Sunny, the dynamic head of the business, has an ugly marriage, with a hysterical wife and a demanding mistress. Suman, the spoilt beauty of the family who whiles her time away giving religious discourses and leading prayer meetings, is hypocritically determined to get her hands on Mummyji’s pair of seven-carat diamond ear studs. Saroj is the unlucky sister, dark where Suman is fair, and unable to stand up for herself. Each one of them wants Mummyji to die.

Full report here Business Standard

Healing touch

Award-winning journalist Geeta Anand launches her debut novel in India

“The fodder for this book came to me in 2001. It is 2010 now and I am pleased that after a lot of struggle the book is finally releasing in India,” said Geeta Anand, the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and now debutant author at the launch of her novel, The Cure (Random House, Rs 399) at The American Centre on Thursday evening.

Anand’s statement summed up her anxiety for her first book, that has also been adapted into a film, Extraordinary Measures, by Hollywood director Tom Vaughan starring Harrison Ford. The film released in the US in January. “To be honest I wasn’t even sure that the book would be complete by then, but even before I had completed the first draft of the novel, I was informed by my publisher that Harrison Ford was keen to make a movie on this topic. That thrilled me and I picked up pace. I constantly stayed in touch with the production team for developing the script,” she added. Although the book released first in the US and Italy, Anand, who works with The Wall Street Journal and is based out of Mumbai, found it difficult to find a publisher in India.

The book captures the true story of an American couple’s struggle to help save their two children who have been diagnosed with a potentially life threatening condition, called Pompe disorder. Since medical research of the disorder is in nascent stages, there is still no permanent cure for it. Anand began writing the book in 2004 after taking “six months leave which got extended to nine months for the entire first draft.”

Full report here Indian Express

Indian publishing needs to get less fun

In India it is editors who decide what readers get to read. Why is it that mediocrity becomes a goal in the attempt to bridge a non-existent divide between ‘literary’ and ‘commercial’ fiction?

In the world of Indian English publishing, kitsch has begun to dominate the mainstream. Penguin India publishes ‘Metro Reads', books that they call ‘fun, feisty, fast'; Random House India produces the ‘Kama Kahani', a series of Indianised Mills and Boons; Hachette India openly states that it cares most about commercial thrillers; and with its latest, highly-marketed release, Johnny Gone Down, HarperCollins India seems to be headed in the same direction. These are all books that openly disclaim any particular literary merit. They are projected instead as ‘fun' reads — with the implication that only a killjoy could possibly protest them.

A preliminary question
But before we get to that question — are these books fun for us? — there is an important preliminary question:why are they being offered to us? The easy answer is that the market is clamouring for them, just look at Chetan Bhagat. But this is too easy. It's been seven years since Bhagat's first book. Why would it take so long to follow his example? Moreover, the mainstay of Bhagat's readership has never been readers per se.It has been non-readers, those who are new to books, even new to the English language. This is certainly a massive group, and after Bhagat's success it has certainly been tapped — but by the smaller publishers, such as India Log and Shrishti Publications — not by the A-list. For them, Bhagat has simply been a fact of life — too dominant to ignore, too declasse to embrace. Which is one reason why their own ‘fun' releases take great pains to explain that they're well-written too, that they ‘bridge the divide' (a fashionable phrase) between the literary and the commercial.

Full report here Hindu

How to eat words

Should you happen to glance at the cookbook section at any bookstore, you’ll see an impressive buffet spread: beautifully shot books, some with near-edible pictures, liberal helpings of authentic ethnological and cultural insight, and the finest writing in the genre of ‘food pornography’. The spread is delectable enough, and varied enough, to have caught the attention of the Paris-based conferrers of the Gourmand award. Last year, the Emperor’s Table by Salma Husain (Roli) won the award for best culinary history. This year, in the Best Easy Recipes category, they chose Monish Gujral’s The Motimahal Cookbook: On the Butter Chicken Trail—a bestseller internationally, what with butter chicken’s relative, Chicken Tikka Masala (CTM), being anointed Britain’s national dish by some. At the other end of the calorie-counting spectrum, Sukham Ayu, Pratibha Jain and Jigyasa Giri’s primer on healthy cooking according to Ayurvedic principles won in the Health and Nutrition category, a niche that is fast catching on.

This is just the tip of the smorgasbord. Cookbooks today bear not even a passing likeness to the shoddily produced “handouts for housewives” that once dominated the genre. Today, they have sharper focus and near-infinite variety. Some target specific social groups, such as cosmopolitan young single people who entertain occasionally (Flash in the Pan, Westland) or IT professionals (Cook IT, Roli). Others provide a sort of food ethnology guide to, say, the Syrian Christian community (The Suriani Kitchen, Westland) or the Maharashtrian kitchen (The Essential Marathi Cookbook, Penguin). Some make a foreign cuisine authentically our own, for an internationally well-travelled class, such as Italian Khana (Random House India), and still others appeal to a rarefied restaurant-frequenting, Travel and Living-watching class. For those who like an international interpretation of Indian food, there’s the forthcoming Modern Spice by cook show host Monica Bhide, or, the Michelin-starred, newly minted ‘luxe fusion’ Indian food pioneered by Vivek Singh, chef of the London-based Cinnamon Club (both RHI).

Full report here Outlook

Rahul Mehta's Quarantine is a slice of gay life

Rahul Mehta’s brassy debut short story collection Quarantine unravels the lives of openly gay Indian-American men — men who are strident in their sexuality, not hiding in pseudo marriages or behind the guise of bisexuality. However, that doesn’t prevent them from being damaged by the various complexities of life — infidelity, heartburn, shady gigolos, past lovers or small-minded relatives.

On his 21st birthday, Rahul came out to his mother about his sexual preference. Now, years later, was this book his way of coming out to the world? “No, I never thought of this book as a coming out (although, in effect, it is kind of functioning that way when it comes to my relatives in India, who, unlike my relatives in America, don’t know that I’m gay),” says US-based Rahul, who is a lecturer in English at Alfred University. “But that’s certainly not why I wrote the stories. Instead, the book came from a desire to tell stories. In the end, I hope that the stories speak.”

With the camp classic Dostana and the recent Supreme Court ruling, does he see the emergence of a stronger gay-themed genre in Indian pop culture? “I hope so. And I hope that we continue to see more and more realistic representations of LGBT characters rather than reductive stereotypes. I think it’s so important in helping us move toward a more tolerant and socially-just society,” he says.

Full report here DNA

Gay men in grey tales

Rahul Mehta's debut collection of short stories, Quarantine, launches in India this month. In simple, fluid prose, Mehta weaves intimate tales of ‘ordinary' Indian-Americans trying to find meaning in their lives and relationships. Many of his characters are gay men, who appear to have come to terms with their sexuality a long time ago. Thus, ‘gayness' is part of every story's normal landscape. Mehta, the son of Gujarati immigrants from Mumbai, was born and bred in Virginia and teaches English at Alfred University in New York state. He talks storytelling and sexuality with Amit Bhattacharya by email. 

Your stories portray family dynamics among Indian immigrants in the US with great intimacy. How autobiographical are they?
The work is certainly shaped by personal experience (but) I would definitely resist any attempt to characterize it as "autobiographical". The work is definitely fiction, not memoir.

Gay relationships are a common thread in your stories. In some of them, parents are comfortable with their son's homosexuality. Does that accurately reflect attitudes within the Indian-American community?
I'm not sure the Indian-American community as a whole is any more accepting of homosexuality than similar communities in India. In fact, in some ways, Indian communities in America might be even more conservative than in India. There is a perception that many Indian immigrants from the first big wave of immigration in the 1950s and 1960s still cling to an idea of "Indian values" that is essentially 50 years out-of-date. However, I've been very fortunate that all of the people in my life – my parents, my brother, my uncles, aunts, cousins, and my parents' family-friends – have been incredibly supportive, not just of my being gay, but of my being a writer, my choosing a path that may be different from the standard stereotype of the Indian-American doctor or engineer or banker.

Full interview here Times of India

Reverse psychology

Anuvab Pal's debut novel has appeared on screen already

The ironies of life do not escape Anuvab Pal easily. And the occasion of our meeting was definitely one such moment. A happy irony, as Pal would like to call it.

Pal came to launch his debut book titled The President Is Coming at the Kala Ghoda Arts Festival. Discerning viewers will remember watching a mockumentary with a motley group of characters led by Konkona Sen Sharma and produced by Ramesh Sippy that hit theatres in November 2008. To release a book after the movie has been released is a unique event. “The President Is Coming was originally a play, turned into a screenplay and now a book. Against my better judgement, (publishers) Random House wanted me to write this story,” Pal, who has also written the screenplay of Loins Of Punjab Presents, said.

Joined by India's leading graphic novelist Sarnath Banerjee, Pal spoke at length on the characters in his book, the growing schism between rural and urban India, the Americanisation of modern India and the shallowness of today's youth

Full report here Screen

Good, trashy, popular

Hindi and Tamil pulp fiction, in translation, is winning converts among English readers

The just-concluded Kala Ghoda Arts Festival in Mumbai saw the launch of Surender Mohan Pathak’s latest pulp fiction novel, Daylight Robbery, in English translation. Pathak’s novels were all originally written in Hindi, and have only recently been translated into English to reach a wider audience.

Pathak’s books aren’t alone when it comes to translations from Indian languages to English in this genre. Random House India has also jumped onto the translation bandwagon and will soon produce, for example, translated volumes of Urdu writer Ibn-e-Safi’s Jasoosi Duniya series.

Is it paradoxical that vernacular pulp fiction is being rediscovered at the same time as Indian literary writing in English is growing popular. Literary critic (and Business Standard columnist) Nilanjana S Roy does not think so. She says, “It’s just a sign that we do have a wide readership in India which reads in English, and which is looking for a variety of reading that hasn’t been provided by Indian literary fiction in English.” According to her, the response to pulp fiction has been good because “this is what has been missing from the IWE [Indian writing in English] scene — good, trashy, popular writing”.

Full report here Business Standard