The lively adventures of an Indian diplomat

These days, when the Indian government is in the midst of exacting negotiations with the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) to draft a new safeguards agreement with the country, it is worthwhile to recall that an eminent Indian played a major role in shaping the nuclear watchdog at the time of its establishment. more

In Good Faith

By Aditi Bhaduri

Asra Q. Nomani's Standing Alone in Mecca is at once compelling and predictable, clichéd and refreshing. Its moments of startling frankness and honesty prevent it from descending into another exercise in presenting the 'positive' side of Islam, of which there has been a regular barrage since the attacks of 11 September 2001. While Nomani's work (which was first published in 2005, but has recently been released in India) does throw up more questions than it answers, the questions posed are piquant enough. Perhaps most importantly, Nomani does not attempt to gloss over uncomfortable facts. more

The Endangered Solitude

The Solitude of Emperors, David Davidar’s second novel, is an ambitious essay at delineating the daemons of communalism that stalk the essentially secular soul of India in many seductive disguises. Madness and hysteria of communal violence that blighted India’s brightest and most cosmopolitan metropolis in 1993-1994 following the demolition of a Muslim mosque in the northern Indian town of Ayodhya, which Hindus claim as the birthplace of the divine king Ram, shadows this narrative of uses and abuses of religion. History is an insatiable tyrant, as the author tells us in the opening paragraph of the novel. more

America, Oh America!

Mohsin Hamid's The Reluctant Fundamentalist is an incisive portrait of the transformation of a Princeton-educated Pakistani youth with a cushy job in the Big Apple and an American girlfriend into an America-baiting radical with a sneaking sympathy for the 9/11 attackers. The novel astutely dramatises simultaneous schizophrenia and romance with the American dream many educated Muslim youths experience as they go about making existential choices in a world caught in the treacherous currents of East-West encounters. more

Love triangle in Stalinist gulag

House of Meetings by Martin Amis

Martin Amis's new novella is an audacious attempt to compress the past 60 years of Russian history with all its hidden squalor and unspoken dread through the triangular love story of two half-brothers and the Jewish woman they love. A "love story, gothic in timbre and triangular in shape," Amis' 11th novel revisits Stalin's labour camps and dramatises the nature of masculinity, power, violence and loveless sex.

The Road to Nowhere

The Road by Cormac McCarthy

McCarthy's new masterpiece is a road trip, albeit a scary and nightmarish one, by a father and his young son as they trudge from the mountains to the coast in a post-apocalyptic world reduced to ashes and ruins. It’s an unremittingly bleak landscape evoked in stripped-down prose so characteristic of the author’s style in which darkness and grotesqueness are the norm, a world peopled by “men who would eat your children in front of your eyes” and looters who look like “shoppers in the commissaries of hell.”

Demystifying exotic Africa

My Mother's Lovers by Christopher Hope

My Mother's Lovers is the story of Alex who reminisces about his glamorous multi-faceted mother and the adventurous life she lived in Africa. Kathleen, a tall white woman, a woman of many talents, is a hunter, a woman with many lovers, one of them being the legendary novelist Ernest Hemingway and is an aviator who flew over South Africa.

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Christmas Reading: The End Of Innocence

by Moni Mohsin

Goodbye, Innocence?

Moni Mohsin's debut novel "The End of Innocence," set in Lahore in 1971 – the defining year that saw a brutal civil war culminating in the division of Pakistan and the creation of Bangladesh – is the story of innocence caught in adult entanglements. It’s also about dangerous love – “the kind of love that "tears you away from your family” - and what it means to cross the acceptable into the forbidden in a feudal culture.

The conflict is observed through the eyes of the nine-year-old Laila, a privileged girl who is spending her winter vacation at her family estate in rural Pakistan. Rani, the granddaughter of the family maid, keeps her company. Rani, the yearning dreamer, pursues a love affair with a stranger and such are the consequences that it provokes a full-blown crisis and brings to fore the contradictions of a fundamentally feudal society.

Christmas Reading: Shantaram

by Gregory David Roberts

Freedom Song

A book that is still generating a buzz, this time because of its rebirth as a Hollywood movie, is Gregory David Roberts's fictionalised autobiography Shantaram. Shantaram, published in 2004, chronicles Roberts' life as an escaped convict from an Australian jail (one of Australia’s most wanted men) who comes to Bombay as a fugitive. Shantaram means a 'man of peace', and the book is Roberts's physical and spiritual journey in around 900 pages.

The novel describes the author's escape from Victoria's maximum security prison in broad daylight and his consequent arrival in India, where he carves a new identity as Lin. In a new and unknown city with its own brand of original intrigue and cacophony, Lin tries to fit in. “The truth is, the man I am was born in those moments, as I stood near the flood sticks with my face lifted to the Christmas rain".

Read it all here

Love triangle in Stalinist gulag

House of Meetings by Martin Amis

Martin Amis's new novella is an audacious attempt to compress the past 60 years of Russian history with all its hidden squalor and unspoken dread through the triangular love story of two half-brothers and the Jewish woman they love. A "love story, gothic in timbre and triangular in shape," Amis' 11th novel revisits Stalin's labour camps and dramatises the nature of masculinity, power, violence and loveless sex.

The Road to Nowhere

The Road by Cormac Mc Carthy

Mc Carthy's new masterpiece is a road trip, albeit a scary and nightmarish one, by a father and his young son as they trudge from the mountains to the coast in a post-apocalyptic world reduced to ashes and ruins. It’s an unremittingly bleak landscape evoked in stripped-down prose so characteristic of the author’s style in which darkness and grotesqueness are the norm, a world peopled by “men who would eat your children in front of your eyes” and looters who look like “shoppers in the commissaries of hell.”

Demystifying exotic Africa

My Mother's Lovers by Christopher Hope

My Mother's Lovers is the story of Alex who reminisces about his glamorous multi-faceted mother and the adventurous life she lived in Africa. Kathleen, a tall white woman, a woman of many talents, is a hunter, a woman with many lovers, one of them being the legendary novelist Ernest Hemingway and is an aviator who flew over South Africa.

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Sacred Games by Vikram Chandra

Vikram Chandra's Sacred Games, in its epic sweep of characters and dazzling diversity of a richly imagined world, is the closest one can come to The Great Indian Novel -- the elusive grail that has goaded and haunted every practitioner of Indian Writing in English.

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Ode to a Liberal India

The Argumentative Indian is no not an exotic creature or an invention of Amartya Sen; turn left, right or centre - this redoubtable creature with an inborn love for speaking is everywhere, arguing and radiating his pleasure in this great Indian gift.

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Deal of The Century

Raja Mohan’s “Impossible Allies” ... makes an interesting reading of the negotiations between India and the United States that led to the conclusion of the Indo-US nuclear cooperation deal in Washington on July 18, 2005.

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Picturing the Soul and Substance of India

Hip-shaking dancers on a glitzy Bollywood set, shy Muslim women peering through their veils, beautiful people playing polo and villagers enjoying bullock cart races - they are just some of the stunning and contrasting images of contemporary India showcased in this lavishly produced coffee-table book.

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A Literary Viagra?

Indian-American novelist Abha Dawesar's new novel "That Summer in Paris" is a passionate meditation on the subversive and anarchic nature of desire and sexuality and their incestuous connect with art in general and writing in particular. ... a compelling story about the agelessness of desire, its mystic kinship with death, and it's transfiguration into art and writing. In more ways than one, That Summer in Paris is a "a novel of bliss," in the Barthesian sense, and an exploration of art and its redemptive powers.

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Revisiting Khushwant Singh's Partition Saga

Thousands of Hindus, Muslims and Sikhs walking bare-foot and in bullock-carts migrating to their newly-born countries, trains that brought in cargoes of the dead, instead of the living, children clutching at wizened hands of their deceased parents, bodies lying on streets like so much garbage with vultures pecking at them.

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St. Stephen's College: Sifting Myths from Reality

St. Stephen's College, which celebrated its 125th anniversary early this year, has inspired extreme emotions over the years, ranging from pure unadulterated devotion, verging on the religious, to undisguised resentment, even hostility.

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