'Love is when I can't pay attention in class'

Presenting an excerpt from Penguin's latest book by Ludhiana-based Chanchaldeep Singh Sandhu.

Penguin India's new series of 'mass market books' aims to target the youth by bringing out novels inspired by today's environment and situations at work or at college, different challenges they face in their love lives and relationships.

Debutante author Chanchaldeep Singh Sandhu's I Never Thought I Could Fall in Love is the story of a boy who did not know what he was capable of doing in life until he fell in love.

Here is an excerpt from the book:
Next morning, Sid came and insisted that I get ready to attend class. I resisted a lot, but he forced me to come with him to college. After so many days, I got dressed in clean and ironed clothes, after having showered and combed my hair. It felt I good. I liked my bearded look. I smiled at myself and followed Sid to college. As I entered class, I looked at Monica. She was wearing a yellow suit and looked as beautiful as ever. She looked at me; our eyes met for a few seconds but then the teacher came inside and the moment was broken. I hurriedly took a seat and became conscious that I was sitting next to Mickey.

Full report here Rediff

'TCS deserved to go public much earlier'

Subramaniam Ramadorai took the reins at TCS in 1996 when the Indian IT industry was on the cusp of a quantum leap in growth and globalisation. During his 13-year watch, TCS became the first billion-dollar IT company to come out of India, even though it only went public in 2004, more than a decade after companies like Infosys had stolen the thunder in the stock market. Now, two years after his retirement, Ramadorai reflects on the challenges he faced and how he overcame them, in his book that’s just been published, The TCS Story... And Beyond. In this interview with DNA, Ramadorai fleshes out some key takeaways from his TCS experience.

You’ve written about how you changed the TCS tagline from ‘Beyond The Obvious’ to ‘Experience Certainty’. What was the logic behind this change?
We felt we had to clarify the obvious in some way, because obvious was obvious to us but not to the customer. People went haywire in talking about the future, future and future, when you had not even created the future. So we were in two extremes: one was stating the obvious and looking inward, I know what I’m good at, this is what TCS does; the other way was to say, let’s define the future, in three words — Innovation, Technology, Consulting. Then we saw that 100 companies do the same thing (innovation, technology, consulting). It doesn’t communicate anything that is unique about TCS. So we hired a global branding company to interview a bunch of people and come back to us with a definitive statement that exactly describes the TCS DNA and that is easily understandable to everybody. The key thing that came out of all these deliberations was that these TCS guys deliver what they promise and they don’t promise what they can’t deliver. Out of that came ‘Experience Certainty’.

On the business side, it seems to have suited Tata Sons from an accounting perspective to run TCS as a subsidiary until finally you had your IPO in 2004. On hindsight, do you think you would have been better off if TCS had entered the market 10 years earlier, along with its peers like Infosys and Wipro? 
We always had this debate. It’s not as if we decided in 2003 to go public in 2004. It was a continuous journey of looking at what was good for the parent, what was good for TCS’ growth, and what was the right thing to do. It is true we were not getting the visibility we should have had. We had everything that was required for us to be listed earlier than a lot of other companies because we had been in the industry much longer than them. But it was a constant process of dialoguing with the owners, Tata Sons, and coming to the conclusion that we will do it when the time is right.

Full interview here DNA

'Pak GenNext in US doesn't want to return'

In the new generation of Pakistani immigrants to the US, the ties that bind youngsters to their Asian homeland are fast disappearing, says Jabeen Akhtar, writer and policymaker of Pakistani origin from the US.

"We cannot be expected to speak about what's happening back home in Pakistan and India all the time," Akhtar, who drafts policies for the People for Ethical Treatment to Animals (PETA) in the US, told IANS.

"I know of many immigrant friends who don't want to return home," she said. "Personally, I don't want to go back."

Akhtar, who has made her debut as an novelist with the much-talked-about Welcome to Americastan, is in India to promote her book.

She said she wanted to provide an alternative perspective on the young South Asian Islamic diaspora in Washington, DC.

"Every book on South Asia has arranged marriages and this idea of the home country being an exotic locale," Akhtar said. "The protagonist takes his exotic odyssey back home... it involves an identity crisis. The 'goras' (whites) may like it but the idea is a bunch of crap!"

Her book provides an irreverent snapshot of Pakistani immigrants in the US through the eyes of young Samira, a Pakistani-American woman.

It has been hailed by critics and senior writers like Bapsi Sidhwa and Moni Mohsin as a funny, original and thoughtful look at her community.

Full report here Daijiworld

Ramadorai recalls the TCS Story

Tech geeks are always busy dabbling in software and hardware language that they hardly indulge in tales of their work, but former chief executive officer of Tata Consultancy Services, Subramanium Ramadorai, proved it otherwise with the launch of his book The TCS Story … and Beyond.

Speaking at the launch of the book by noted scientist M S Swaminathan here at a function organised by Penguin Books and Taj Coromandel in association with the Confederation of Indian Industry on Wednesday evening, the advisor to the Prime Minister in the National Skill Development Council said the book is about getting the story from an IT professional and it is the biggest challenge considering that their whole day is spent on working with hardware and software.

“It was a challenging experience to put in my 40 years of experience in 300 pages and the biggest was to make the IT professionals recall a project to capture the finer nuances of the experiences. As such, I mastered the art of asking the same question so that I could get what I am looking for,” disclosed Ramadorai while highlighting how he went about compiling his book.

Full report here IBNLive

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)

Window of opportunity

You can be sure that intelligent people would say that nothing could be worse than a mediocre life. T.G.C. Prasad, will agree, in fact his book, “Unusual People Do Things Differently” (Penguin; Rs. 399) is about all those people who go that extra mile to do better the things they do. “In this book, I have covered profiles of 65 people, who are striving hard to do extraordinary things. It is a book for every student and every working professional,” says T.G.C at the launch of his book at Reliance TimeOut.

The launch was in full attendance by some of the people who were featured in the book, each giving us a quick recap into their success and management tips. The book features the views and experiences of people like Azim Premhji, Mike Lawrie and Mother Teresa to a chef, a masseuse and a service boy all of whom have inspired T.G.C.

The author T.G.C. Prasad took to jogging a little late in life and was stringent about his routine which eventually led to him suffering from repeated stress injury. It was around this time that he met Dr. Keyur Anil Bach who operated on both his ankles and even re-inforced his faith in a life he had resigned to wheelchair.

“I jogged incessantly for almost five years and suddenly there was a pain in my ankles which increased. The doctors said that my bones were dying due to repetitive stress injury (RSI) and there was no clean cure for my ailment. I tried all kinds of methods which obviously didn’t work. Finally I went into infusing my own bone cells into channels drilled in my ankles grown out of bone-cells extracted from my iliac-crest. And fortunately this method worked and restored my dying bone,” narrates T.G.C.

Full report here Hindu

No place like home

Thapa offers a mixed bag of stories on contemporary life in Nepal.

Nothing to Declare
:Stories
Rabi Thapa
Penguin
Rs 199; Pp 184
ISBN: 9780143415435

The 16 short stories in Rabi Thapa's debut collection Nothing to Declare is led by, quite aptly, “Initiation”. The story introduces the reader to the milieu of Nepalese society where adolescent Ashok is going through the thread ceremony to initiate him into adulthood, so to say. He rebels inwardly at the endless rituals but dare not protest as the relatives hover around while his cousins get their fill of pulling his legs at his scrawny and “freshly shaven body.” Ashok enjoys the sense of freedom only when he literally tries to follow his uncle Sano-mama's whispered words “Now you are man… you can leave home and go wander the whole world.”

Thapa's stories woven around a young protagonist from Nepal, whether at home or abroad, are a mixed bag. The initial promise shown in the first story is not carried through uniformly to the end.

However, the plots are interesting glimpses into the Nepalese society which is similar in many ways to neighbouring India's. In “Desire”, Subodh, the rich employer's son, falls for the charms of the maid servant but cannot reach out beyond the social hierarchy.

Full report here Hindu

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.

An author's notes

Mitra Phukan talks about her new novel, A Monsoon of Music that was launched on Friday in New Delhi.

Indian classical music belongs to a tradition that has resisted being caught in written scores till nearly the present day. For generations, it has been possible to be illiterate and yet a maestro of music. Today, if musicians are also highly qualified academically, it is usually due to factors other than the pursuit of musical excellence alone. But in this changing world, one of the more positive upshots has been committed artistes who are as adept with the pen as with their art practice, and these individuals very often form a bridge between the relatively opposite worlds of the classical arts and the rest of life. Mitra Phukan, a vocalist trained under the late Biren Phukan and now under Pandit Samaresh Choudhury of Kolkata, is among such artistes. The protagonists of her new novel, A Monsoon of Music, being launched by Zubaan and Penguin Books India this Friday evening in New Delhi, are practitioners of Hindustani music. If one is a dedicated student on the brink of professionalism, two are serene gurus and accomplished performers, while the fourth is a globe-trotting star who seems to have it made. The duality between spirituality and materialism of classical music, old-world images and modern performers, a gentle satire on the ambitions of today's youngsters…all these find a place in the novel. Here Mitra speaks about what went into the writing of the book that took her several years. Edited excerpts from a conversation with the author:

Do you perform regularly?
I used to perform very regularly on the radio and TV and in various performances. But now my writing is taking over, it seems. Also, because of all the conflict, it's difficult for organisers to arrange programmes, especially of classical music. People don't want to stay out late. For the last 10-15 years there has been a dwindling of such shows. If there is a bomb blast the atmosphere changes and you don't really feel like organising a music programme. And if there is a bandh on the day...such events cost lakhs of rupees, so people don't want to take the risk of inviting musicians and having to cancel the programme.

Full interview here Hindu

Delhi’s date with books

It’s almost like a mini-paradise for book lovers and distributors, as the 17th annual Delhi Book Fair kicked off in the Capital on Saturday. With over 300 publishers participating in the fair, there are thousands  of books to choose from.

“This year, the theme of the fair is travel and tourism. We have 625 stalls and 300 publishers who are participating, and we also have delegates from countries such as UK, Pakistan and the US,” says Shakti Malik, general secretary, The Federation of Indian Publishers.

Among the participating publishers are Penguin, Rupa & Co, S Chand, Pustak Mahal. Besides networking opportunities for publishers, the fair is also a great venue for book launches and workshops. “People coming into the book fair and browsing through the books is a very different experience from checking out books at a store that can stock limited number of books. At our stall, we will be talking about two books - Pakistan Beyond The ‘Crisis State’ by Maleeha Lodhi and The Punjab Bloodied Partitioned And Cleansed by Ishtiaq Ahmed,” says Kapish Mehra, managing director of Rupa & Co.

Full report here Hindustan Times

Best of Khushwant Singh back in new avatar

Khushwant Singh, the grand old man of contemporary Indo-Anglian literature has returned in a new avatar with an updated edition of his signature anthology, Not a Nice Man to Know: The Best of Khushwant Singh.

The anthology, first published 20 years ago with 30 of Singh’s selected works, has been revised to include 18 more of his essays, short stories and opinions.

The revised edition was launched by Penguin India at the Le Meridien in the capital here Saturday.

It was accompanied with a dramatized reading of his postcolonial play which features in the book – Tyger Tyger, Burning Bright – by adman and stage personality Suhel Seth.

The 96-year-old writer could not join the gathering because of ill-health.

Releasing the anthology, editor Nandini Mehta, who edited the first edition of the collection 20 years ago, said, “When I edited the first volume of the best of Khushwant Singh 20 years ago, the writer had said it was perhaps the last book on him and he would not be able to write any more.”

Full report here Hindustan Times

Penguin India launches mobile application

Leading book publisher, Penguin Books India has launched a mobile application that offers information of all books by the penguin Books India.

The new mobile app supports iPhone and Nokia Symbian devices. With the new application, users can read reviews, browse author's name, latest books, download books available at Penguin Book India.

The new mobile application can connect the user with other book lovers in the "Stay Connected' section which redirects to the Penguin India, YouTube, Facebook and Twitter pages.

In the "Stay Connect" section, users can suggest, recommend, watch video, discuss books in the Penguin India on Facebook, You Tube and Twitter pages.

Full report here Art & Design

David Davidar surges in India

Former Penguin Canada president David Davidar left Canada under a particularly dark cloud early this year. But somewhere over the Atlantic, that cloud dissipated, and he landed here to an open-armed welcome. He has resumed his place at the top of the flourishing Indian literary world, and that nasty allegation of sexual harassment in the (other) colonies is yesterday’s news.

Two months ago, Davidar, 52, announced he was launching a new publishing house, Aleph Book Co., focusing on literary books, both fiction and non-fiction. The Indian industry, centred here in Delhi, has been watching eagerly: It is a current favourite preoccupation in book circles to speculate on which authors and which executives will defect to Aleph.

His new house will publish 15 or 20 books by the end of next year, Davidar says, although he won’t name any of the authors of those planned books, saying he is saving that for a “spectacular announcement” in December. “There will be people Canadians will recognize,” he says. “There will be big-name novelists, and the next generation of novelists who will set the world alight.”

But he acknowledges he has yet to sign contracts with any authors, and while he has hired a number of high-profile staff, he says, none of the appointments has been announced.

Full report here The Globe and Mail

Between love and duty

Manasi Vaidya's debut novel delves into the pressures of seeking intimacy in the world of high pressure jobs, says Nupur Sharma

Manasi Vaidya's novel No Deadline for Love (Penguin) is the latest in the burgeoning genre of chick lit/ rom-com reads. The book features a spunky protagonist called Megha who has for most of her life done what was expected of her: graduation in economics, MBA in marketing and then a straight-laced job in a high-profile FMCG company. There comes a point where she starts to wonder if this unending routine of juggling late hours and unreasonable deadlines is really her life's calling. Her mother's desperate attempts to put her on the ‘marriage market' are not making life any easier. And to top it all, Megha's latest project has been bogged down by a complete dearth of creative ideas, giving her nasty boss the perfect excuse to disregard the blood, sweat and tears she's poured into her job so far. Add to this volatile mix, Yudi (the team's new creative consultant) who is gorgeous, sardonic and only too eager to disagree with Megha and trample upon all her ideas. This sets the stage for a quirky battle of wits and some unexpected romance.

In the deluge of writing in her genre, how does Manasi locate her work? “My novel is essentially a story about having the conviction to follow your heart. Sure, it's also a romantic comedy and it has a liberal dose of corporate dynamics, but at its heart it is the story of a girl who is struggling to fit into a place where she is increasingly beginning to feel like an outsider and about how she finally finds it within her to follow her heart,” Manasi says.

Full report here Hindu

‘Why I took on Arindam Chaudhuri’

Siddhartha Deb’s latest book, The Beautiful and the Damned, paints a picture of present-day India through the stories of five individuals who span the country’s social, economic and geographical gamut.

The book’s first chapter, focusing on the rise of businessman Arindam Chaudhuri, was excerpted in The Caravan, a Delhi-based monthly magazine. Mr. Chaudhuri is the director of the Indian Institute of Planning and Management, a popular privately-run network of management schools.

The article gained more attention when the IIPM filed a lawsuit against Mr. Deb, his publishers Penguin India, The Caravan and Google India for “grave harassment and injury.” (You can read more about Mr. Deb’s publishing saga in this New Yorker article.)

The Indian edition of the book, published by Penguin India, was released without the first chapter. Mr. Deb said the lawsuit alleges that he and other defendants are working for IIPM’s competitors. This is what The Caravan had to say about the case. Mr. Chaudhuri and an IIPM official did not respond to requests for comment.

Full report here WSJ blogs

Smoke on the water

In the second of his ‘Ibis’ trilogy, Ghosh is at the pinnacle of his prowess. It’s a triumph, a truly global novel

We’re just halfway into the year, but if there’s one novel in 2011 that will make the pulse race and the mind wonder with sweep, scale, power and a riveting, multi-threaded story, it is Amitav Ghosh’s River of Smoke. Coming three years after Sea of Poppies, which was the first volume in the Ibis trilogy, the middle panel of the triptych is even vaster, denser with action and richer in backdrop.

Poppies was set primarily in the Calcutta of 1838—the fulcrum of the British empire in the east, where trade was the lubricating agent of colonization—and on board the Ibis, transporting indentured workers to Mauritius, along with convicts. But River of Smoke abandons this centre, for the most part, stretching its action from Mauritius in the West to Canton in the East, with passing cameos by other parts of the world, such as the island of St Helena where Napoleon is exiled after losing the Battle of Waterloo, which puts in an appearance in the novel.

Much of the action continues to take place on board merchant ships—either in mid-voyage, or anchored off the coast of China, as events come to a slow boil in the world’s largest market for the opium that British and Indian traders make a killing on. The line from the poppy fields of eastern India is thus drawn all the way to Canton. Here, local opium dealers supplying a willing population of addicts not only help reverse the trade deficit of the British empire with China—while adding to the wealth of individual opium traders from all countries who’ve joined the gold rush—they also lead the Chinese empire to clamp down on opium imports. The outcome, of course, will be the Opium Wars, in not one but two editions.

Full review here Mint 

A cover story

With the advent of e-books, book cover designers talk about the winds of change

Admit it, we judge books by their covers. Books are like people. They come dressed in different outfits. Some are sombre old men in black. Some others are inscribed with the topsy turvy letters of youth. Authors of books are celebrated but the designers who make the covers are too often forgotten.

With the advent of e-books, will book covers become a thing of the past and turn cover designers into an endangered species? In the city, the world of book cover designers is buzzing about the winds of change. “I hope I get to do a lot more than just the cover. Maybe multiple covers for each book?” says Kedarnath Gupta, an independent illustrator for Hachette India. Bena Sareen, 42, Creative Designer, Penguin Books, India, adds that she is excited at the possibility of interaction that e-book covers will allow.

Most designers have chosen this field as a vocation. Shuka Jain, Art Director of Harper Collins, who ventured into book designing because it combined her two loves — art and books — too says that she is far from worried about the virtual encroachment. Sareen adds that she was an avid sociologist for many years before a chance meeting with a graphic design professor in the US convinced her that this was a profession she could pursue. Gupta, on the other hand, went from daytime copywriter who doubled as an illustrator at night for six years, to a full-time illustrator recently.

Full report here Indian Express

A clash of worldviews

It’s chick lit. Good lord, no, it’s far from chick lit. It’s very funny. Oh yeah? Then how come it makes you shudder? It’s vastly different from the kind of novel we’ve come to expect from Pakistani writers. No, it’s just the same. You want to whack the heroine, she’s so annoying. You want to hug her and take her away to a place where life is less traumatic than where she is now. You laugh at the way the media is portrayed in the book. You wince because it seems so familiar. You send up a silent prayer of thanks to whoever is responsible for where you live. You know that, if you weren’t so deliberately blind, where you live is actually quite similar to where this book is set.

Beautiful From This Angle
Maha Khan Phillips
Penguin
Rs250; pp 240

That’s a lot of internal argument for a novel that’s only 232 pages long, but you can’t read Pakistani writer Maha Khan Phillips’s Beautiful From This Angle without putting it down every few pages to struggle with yourself. The blurb makes it seem simple; so does the first chapter. Then, everything explodes.

So, here’s Amynah Farooqui, a 24-year-old Page 3-type chick who writes a column called ‘Party Queen on the Scene’ for a magazine in Karachi. She’s rich, her parents have separate love lives, she drinks, smokes, does coke (not the soft drink), picks up lovers whenever she feels like, is friends with a TV producer who’s making a reality show featuring British celebrities called ‘Who Wants to Be a Terrorist?’, and is writing an Oppressed Woman’s Novel, about a British Pakistani girl whose father forcibly marries her to a cousin in the homeland — a man who beats her, incarcerates her and kills her dog, Fifi.

Life, for Amynah, is good.

Full review here Hindustan Times

‘I am a story teller’

With her second novel The Disappearance of Irene Dos Santos out recently, Margaret Mascarenhas opens up about how growing up in Venezuela has impacted her writing.

Eight years after Penguin India published her first novel Skin, Margaret Mascarenhas' latest novel The Disappearance of Irene Dos Santos was published in the U.S. by Hachette Book Group Inc. A novel set in Venezuela, The Disappearance of Irene Dos Santos is a differently crafted novel that gently reels in its reader into a story of love, family, belonging and the “search for individual truth”, set against a backdrop of revolution, uncertainty and change. Shortly after its India launch recently, Margaret Mascarenhas talks about the book, its subtext of resistance, growing up in Venezuela, and the influences on her work as a writer.

The Disappearance of Irene Dos Santos is an intriguingly crafted book. You've used magic realism a lot. The final chapter catches the reader completely by surprise.
Yes, everybody gets zapped by the end. But it's really up to the reader to decide if it's this or that. I grew up in South America, so magic realism is part of my psyche. But in this book, I turn magical realism completely on its head.Technically, I was doing several things. I am questioning the genre of magical realism. I am converting to writing an essentially oral cliff-hanger telenovela format. And I also tried to tell a story in a closed third person narration, through the point of view of nine characters that the reader must get in love with immediately, and never repeat a character, while pulling the base story line through those nine characters' point of view. I had to see if I could pull that off successfully. And I think I have.

When I write I find it's important for me to challenge myself technically, in story telling, in terms of format and the way I would present it. It took me five years to complete, but I can never feel any urgency to rush things until I am fully satisfied with the work myself.

Full interview here Hindu

Old wine in new bottle

More like fine aged wine, Delhi’s rich past and present, flora and fauna, and its delectable flavours find place in the pages of this set of books

You could call it jumping on the Commonwealth Games bandwagon or smart packaging. But you could also call it presenting a mostly first-rate selection of fiction and non-fiction books that have the Capital city as their focus.

The big daddy of English publishing in India, Penguin Books, has unveiled the Delhi Bookshelf, a set of 21 titles, 20 of which have been published previously. Three-four books each have been slotted in different categories—anthologies, biographies, histories, stories and food. Two titles each come under journeys and “others”. And one of the two in this last hold-all category is the gem Trees of Delhi, by the film-maker-turned-self-taught naturalist Pradeep Kishen. A delightful compendium of the trees that can be found in Delhi—non-native species planted along its boulevards and in its many gardens, as well as those found in the wild in the Ridge area—it has bite-size nuggets of historical and general anecdotes, photos and diagrams, all presented with a simple and straightforward elegance.

“The last Englishman will be an Indian”—maybe so, but many Dilliwalas are coming around to the view that the last of their ilk will turn out to be a Scotsman. We are talking, of course, about William Dalrymple, author of another classic in this list, City of Djinns. His more recent offering, a biography of Bahadur Shah Zafar, titled The Last Mughal, makes the cut too, as does his essay in the excellent anthology, Celebrating Delhi, edited by Mala Dayal and released just a couple of months ago. The other personage in this collection is the redoubtable and irrepressible Khushwant Singh, as a novelist (Delhi) and as an editor of an anthology (City Improbable: Writings on Delhi). Singh has also contributed a memorable piece on his father Sir Sobha Singh, who built and owned large chunks of New Delhi, to Celebrating Delhi.

Full report here Mint