Clik here to view.
A Small Diamond
"How does a writer compete against the media's invasion of public discourse in all its chattering, hectoring, commercially packaged format?"This is a challenging, but by the same token, very exciting...
View ArticleClik here to view.
A Poem for The Folded Earth
There was an interesting email recently, on The Folded Earth, from a reader who introduced himself as Ashirbad Raha. He included a poem he had written, in Hindi, which picks up themes and threads from...
View ArticleClik here to view.
The Guardian' Best Books
The year-end lists of best books are starting off early and two books published by Permanent Black (an independent press based in India) featured in in The Guardian. These are Partha Chatterjee's The...
View ArticleGETTING HOME
(This was first published in The Main Point on 26 December 2012.)I came back to Delhi from travels elsewhere on Christmas eve. The roads were windswept and foggy and, unusually for any Indian city,...
View ArticleClik here to view.
From The Daily Beast, 2 January 2012
Ravi Das Camp is about seven miles from the president’s palace in New Delhi. En route are the mansions where members of parliament live, guarded by armed soldiers in bunkers. The men who in December...
View ArticleClik here to view.
This week in the world's biggest democracy
1. Ashis Nandy was booked a day after remarks he made during a discussion at the Jaipur Literary Festival, under Section 3(1) of the SC/ST Act, "which is non-bailable and invites a 10-year jail term....
View ArticleClik here to view.
UNDER THE MASK
@font-face { font-family: "Cambria"; }@font-face { font-family: "Lucida Grande"; }@font-face { font-family: "Baskerville"; }p.MsoNormal, li.MsoNormal, div.MsoNormal { margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt; font-size:...
View ArticleClik here to view.
SPANISH, ROMANIAN, NORWEGIAN
The Folded Earth is travelling in other languagesIn Spanish this month... and Romanian (out now)It is also out now in paperback in Norwegian, where the hardback was published in 2011.And out later...
View ArticleClik here to view.
BLIND DATE
Summertime, and the tourists have come, the water supply has dried up, garden plants have shrivelled, the forest is getting ready to go up in flames -- as every year. But the roadside bushes are loaded...
View ArticleClik here to view.
SPARKLER
Celebration time. Jyotsna, the girl who lives next door, has passed her Class Ten board exams (CBSE): and with a 92 percentile score. Her report card had no B grades at all, only As, and many of those...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Jam Session
Two days of stormy weather and now there are pre-Raphaelite mornings when any number of blessed damozels must be leaning out from the golden bars of heaven thinking Ranikhet's the place to be....
View ArticleClik here to view.
The Return of the Leeches
At first, you think it's rainwater that's soaked your feet. Take your shoes off and you see your socks are bright red. A black slug is writhing on your ankle. Your skin crawls, your blood flows, but...
View ArticleClik here to view.
A Matter of Belonging
Fear takes physical form in our neighbourhood in Hyderabad: it is embodied in a man who seems a hundred years old. When he is sighted round the corner, bent and frowning, heading with rapid steps for...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Paris Diary
At a little square near St Sulpice a white-bearded man in a printed shirt in dappled autumn colours strolled over. He had a genial twinkle in his eyes and all the time in the world on that sunny...
View ArticleClik here to view.
The Missing Slate
THE MISSING SLATE's latest issue ("The Politics of Art") features an extract from The Folded Earth as well as fiction from Anjum Hasan, Anjali Joseph, Jhumpa Lahiri, Kuzhali Manickavel, and Sidin...
View ArticleClik here to view.
A Pig Called Dolores and Other Australian stories
I learnt many new things on my first visit to Australia. That water drains anticlockwise Down Under. That Victorian refers not to nineteenth-century England but to the state of Victoria, of which...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Mauritius Diary
Photograph by Anuradha RoyIs This Us?A bus with ‘La Perle de la Savanne’ painted down its back and sides trundles down the road and we crawl in its wake. Behind us, many others as patient. There’s no...
View Article