Lust As Crust

Khushwant Singh on Women,
Sex, Love and Lust
Hay House
Rs 299; Pp 220
ISBN 9789381431009
Paperback

An anthology of sexy stories by Khushwant Singh—and all of them packed into a mere 219 pages? But if the man’s a sex maniac and can think of nothing else, why has he written so little on sex? Especially, as the blurb itself says, when he’s authored more than a hundred books and penned countless words for countless magazines?

The answer quite simply is that the Sardar in the Bulb is not as obsessed with bosoms and buttocks as he himself likes to make out. A wholly rounded human being, he does have a glad eye—but then, which full-blooded man hasn’t? After all, the good Lord chose to make our gender look ordinary, but, conversely, made almost every member of the other half worth not just one look but several, preferably of the sideways kind.

The savvy Khushwant Singh, who has more of his father’s commercial cunning than he would care to admit, spotted this universal male failing decades ago. And he has leveraged it to run the most successful business enterprise in the written word that India has known while getting on with his real interests—the history, heritage and future of his community, the Sikhs.

That magnificent obsession has been both his doom and his triumph.

Full report here Outlook

Under the covers

One of his books got the Bad Sex in Fiction Award. He has done about 60 sting operations for various television channels, the most infamous of these was Operation West End. His latest book, The Emissary, will be out next weekend. Anirudhha Bahal tells Aditi Phadnis that he revels in bloodless cuts

For Aniruddha Bahal, writer, film-maker and investigative journalist, the moment of truth came in Lucknow when he was in his early 20s. He had just joined a financial newspaper and his proud parents had cut out all his reports and made a scrap book. Bahal used to anchor a page called ‘Corporate Royalty’ — a full-page 3,000-word weekly profile of one or other corporate baron. Over tea with a friend from Canada, his mother brought out the scrap-book and showed it to her friend. “My son has written this,” she said.

“Our Canadian guest read it right to the end but didn’t say a word about the writing, style... nothing. All she said was: ‘It’s good for the person in question.’ I was in the other room, in Lucknow on vacation and I heard her comment. At that time, I comprehended only dimly, what she’d meant. Later, I realised how full of s**t that kind of journalism is,” Bahal says. Bahal turned tack with a veangence. All his work after this —whether as a journalist or film-maker — has been an attack on pretension, lies and hypocrisy. His enemies are the self-righteous and the corrupt. They are objects of savage satire and ridicule, mounted by Bahal with a straight face.

Full report here Business Standard