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Trading in secrets
'Secrets are my currency: I deal with them for a living. The secrets of desire, of what people really want, and of what they fear the most. The secrets of why love is difficult, sex complicated, living painful and death so close and yet placed far away,' says the opening lines of the novel. In his new novel, Kureishi, the author of many critically acclaimed novels, including The Buddha of Suburbia, The Black Album, My Ear at His Heart, harks back to some of persistent themes in his oeuvre: youthful rebellion, transgressive desires, non-conformism with what he calls the “public school ethos of family honour” and responsibility. The continuous dialectic between the pursuit of pleasures and the pressures of reality is another leitmotif in his writings. 'The only real pleasures are the transgressive pleasures,' he says. 'It's much harder for adults to find pleasure, because there's so much duty. And adults are far more inhibited, so their pleasures are harder, as it were, to dig out. The price is much higher, as well,” he says in a recent interview. Not the one to believe in fancy artistic manifestoes, Kureishi’s notion of his being in the world is illuminating. 'I'm committed to my family, to my art and to myself,' he says. Akbar’s Jodha merely a fantasy? Ask Rushdie
'Queens floated within his palaces like ghosts, Rajputs and Turkish sultanas playing catch-me-if-you-can. One of these royal personages did not really exist. She was an imaginary wife, dreamed up by Akbar in the way that lonely children dream up imaginary friends, and, in spite of the presence of many living, if floating, consorts, the Emperor was of the opinion that it was the real queens who were the phantoms and the nonexistent beloved who was real. He gave her a name, Jodha...' Jodha's sisters, her fellow-wives, deeply resentful of their spectral competitor, were convinced that the emperor has 'put her together ... by stealing bits of them all'. 'So: the limitless beauty of the imaginary queen came from one consort, her Hindu religion from another, and her incalculable wealth from yet a third. Her temperament, however, was Akbar's own creation. No real woman was ever like that, so perfectly attentive, so undemanding, so endlessly available.” 'She was an impossibility, a fantasy of perfection. They feared her, knowing that, being impossible, she was irresistible, and that was why the King loved her best.” 'The creation of a real life from a dream was a superhuman act, usurping the prerogative of the gods.' In Rushdie’s prose, luminous and teasing by turns, imagination becomes a sovereign act of creation, using “the power of language and image to conjure beautiful somethings from empty nothings,” and, in a sense, the only bulwark against what in modern days would be called fundamentalism. The emperor, who founded Din-I-Illahi, a syncretic worldview in which all voices and religions are free to speak as they choose. ''In Paradise, the words 'worship' and 'argument' mean the same thing,' the emperor declares. 'The Almighty is not a tyrant. In the house of God, all voices are free to speak as they choose, and that is the form of their devotion.'' Books on mobiles Publishing major Penguin Books India has joined hands with Mobifusion Inc., developer and distributor of mobile technologies, to deliver books to mobile phone users across India. The partnership will begin with a focus on the Indian consumer base, and look at a global roll-out in time, expanding to include Penguin's global brand and an array of international products. 'We're excited to partner with innovators at Mobifusion and engage in interactive communications with the millions of mobile users who are also avid readers,' says Mike Bryan, CEO and president, Penguin Books India. 'At Penguin, we aspire to make great literature in all its forms available to the widest possible audience and this is a very significant step in that journey as we look to build a solid mobile reading community across India', says Genevieve Shore, Penguin Group's global digital director. The first three books on offer by Penguin-Mobifusion are - 'The Joy in Loving: A Guide to Daily Living with Mother Teresa' complied by Jaya Chaliha and Edward Le Joly, 'The Path to Tranquillity' by Tibetan spiritual leader the Dalai Lama and 'The Book of Prayer' edited by Renuka Narayanan. 'Indian mobile subscribers are demanding more branded, personalised and localized content from their providers and Mobifusion is committed to actively supporting the needs of the country's users using our patented technologies,' Pavan Mandhani, founder CEO of Mobifusion, said in a release. The mobile providers to be involved in the venture has not been finalised yet. Mobile users will get to read chapters of the books on their phones. Rushdie, Ondaatje Best of Booker favourites Bookies have named Indian-born author Salman Rushdie's 'Midnight's Children' as their odds-on favourite after the foundation running the Booker awards invited people around the world to select the 'Best of Booker' novel. People will select their favourites from among a shortlist of six novels to be selected by a panel and announced in May, the Man Booker Prize for Fiction announced Thursday. As speculation mounted over the shortlist, bookmakers Ladbrokes named Rushdie's path-breaking novel leading at odds of 4/1, followed by Michael Ondaatje's 'The English Patient' at 6/1. William Hill listed Yann Martel's 'Life of Pi' as favourite to win at odds of 4/1, followed by 'Midnight's Children' at 5/1 and Ondaatje just behind that at 7/1. Man Booker announced the one-off Best of the Booker to celebrate the 40th anniversary of the prestigious literary prize. The winner will be announced in July. The prize will honour the best overall novel to have won the prize since it was first awarded April 22, 1969. Forty-one novels will be eligible for the award as there were two winners in 1974 and 1992. The public will choose from a shortlist of six novels to be selected by a panel of judges chaired by British biographer Victoria Glendinning. The two other judges on the panel are writer and broadcaster Mariella Frostrup and John Mullan, professor of English at University College London. Glendinning said: 'The Best of the Booker is a wonderful opportunity to read, or reread, some of the best literature in English of the past four decades. We are having a very good time revisiting the now-classic novels which won the Booker long ago, as well as the celebrated ones from recent years. 'All readers will enjoy this, and we look forward to hearing what the voters think - and which one, from our shortlist, they will judge the Best of the Booker.' Graphic novel, the new flavour 'Graphic novel', which tells stories through illustrations and prose in a single format, is beginning to make a mark in India. 'Kari', a slim 116-page graphic novel that tells the story of Kari, a quiet Indian woman employed in an advertising agency, her inseparable friend Ruth and their life in Mumbai, hit the stands Friday. It has been written and illustrated by Delhi-based Amruta Patil, a first-time novelist. Published by Harper Collins, it has opened a new chapter in contemporary English writing by Indian authors in the country. The illustrations are a mix of black and white drawings and colour sketches. The text, in fancy calligraphy, is placed around and in-between the drawings. But there are also comic book-like blurbs thrown into the picture frames for a heightened effect. Harper Collins has printed 4,000 copies of the book as part of the initial print run and hopes to sell a minimum 3,500 copies. Though popular in the European publishing circuit, the graphic novel took time to take off in India because it has a niche readership despite the popularity of comic books. Goa-based writer-designer Orijit Sen of the 'The River of Stories' fame had dabbled in the medium in the 1990s. This was followed by artist-filmmaker Sarnath Banerjee, who wrote 'Corridor' in 2004 and 'The Barn Owl's Wondrous Capers' in 2007. Amruta began her picture jottings around the time she was seven years old. 'Initially, it was a lot about myself, my own life. And then along the way, I met more clever people, who had better repartees than me and I ingested them into my writing,' she recalled. She is now working on her next graphical novel - a mytho-historical epic that she describes as a 'rather ambitious and longer venture', and a book called '1999'. Kiss singer writing book on prostitution Gene Simmons, lead singer of rock band Kiss, is writing a book on the history of prostitution. Simmons is penning the book titled 'Ladies of the Night' on the basis of his personal perspective, contactmusic.com reports. He said: 'They (prostitutes) make a very good living doing what biology dictates... They charge for their companionship.' The book is to be released later this year. Simmons is also involved in a legal battle over an online video allegedly showing him having sex with a model.
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Playwright, screenwriter, novelist and film-maker Hanif Kureishi is a connoissieur of inner secrets and an astute excavator of people’s hidden desires and their deepest fears. “Something to Tell You,” (published by Faber) – Kureishi’s new novel about a Freudian analyst struggling with a guilty secret – illuminates his talent for deciphering inner speech, of bringing the unsaid into the open. 
Only Salman Raushdie, the maestro of magic realism, can conjure up such fantasies that effortlessly merge and collide with history. In his exquisitely ambivalent short story The Shelter of the World, published in The New Yorker, Rushdie plays with the idea that Emperor Akbar's Hindu wife Jodhabai was merely a figment of the imagination. She was a dream of the all-powerful emperor, prone to visionary levitations that one rarely sees in potentates, Rushdie suggests in his story. 
I can't go on, says Beckett's Unnamable. I will go on. A writer's injuries are his strengths, and from his wounds will flow his sweetest, most startling dreams.
And Proust, too, killing himself to write his book comes close to the concept of dharma when, echoing Balzac, he says that in the end it's less the desire for fame than 'the habit of laboriousness' that takes a writer to the end of a work. But dharma, as this ideal of truth to oneself, or living out the truth in oneself, can also be used to reconcile men to servitude and make them find in paralyzing obedience the highest spiritual good. 'And do thy duty, even if it be humble,' says the Aryan Gita,
'rather than another's, even it be great. To die on one's duty is life: to live in another' death.
My discovery over the years is that the mother tongues have so much in them, so much that is alive, and are much more pervasive, in all strata of society, in all ages from children to the very old, men and women, literate and non-literate. What holds them together? It's not Sanskrit. It's these mother tongues. I think I went into linguistics because of that. That spoken languages had to be very, very important. It was important in my youth to have discovered this.
Writing is a concentrated form of thinking. I don't know what I think about certain subjects, even today, until I sit down and try to write about them. Maybe I wanted to find more rigorous ways of thinking. We are talking now about the earliest writing I did and about the power of language to counteract the wallow of late adolescence, to define things, define muddled expression in economical ways. Let's not forget that writing is convenient. It requires the simplest tools. A young writer sees that with words and sentences on a piece of paper that costs less than a penny he can place himself more clearly in the world. Words on a page, that's all it takes to help him separate himself from the forces around him, streets and people and pressures and feelings. He learns to think about these things, to ride his own sentences into new perceptions.
Always dream and shoot higher than you know you can do. Don’t bother just to be better than your contemporaries or predecessors. Try to be better than yourself. An artist is a creature driven by daemons. He doesn’t know why they chose him and he is usually too busy to wonder why. He is completely amoral in that he will rob, borrow, beg, or steal from anybody and everybody to get the work done.
I am trembling with cold