DesiPundit

Smrti takes us through Curry: A Tale of Cooks and Conquerors, a book by Lizzie Collingaham. She reviews the book that weaves a story around food and our history.

I like the discussion on tea the best. Collingaham reassures, as most of us have always believed, that the quintessentially Indian food is most often a foreign import, like Chilly or accidental inventions, like kebabs. Same is the case with tea. Now the largest producer and a good consumer of tea, India never heard about tea before the British. When tea was planted in Assam and labourers died out of Malaria and abuse from masters, tea was not an Indian thing at all. It took massive marketing strategies - which included distribution of tea in temples, movie screenings to distribute tea and special chinaware and apparently not contaminating and impure to caste – to make tea popular in India.

The most popular article on New York Times on March 30, 2008 was the one titled, It’s Not You, It’s Your Books. It was about how casual references to certain authors or lack of knowledge of certain authors could be a romantic deal breaker. Supriya says that talk about literary taste itself is an uncivil practice.

But the whole idea of a continuum of literary taste, with Dan Brown scraping the bottom of the barrel and, I don’t know, James Joyce (?) as the Holy Grail is so fake. Taste is not supposed to be discrete and defined. The broader the spectrum of discrimination, the happier you are, surely. Lists of favourite books and favourite films are a useful tool for people whose primary mode of interaction is Facebook [or, indeed, Blogger -- would you love me if you had any reason to doubt I was a Juventus fan, for example? I thought not.], but surely an adult will be able to suss out the measure of a man before needing to ask whether said man enjoys Kafka and Murakami. I mean, surely, comrades, SURELY, the crux of the matter is not what you love, but how you love it.

Gregory David Roberts, a gun-runner and drug dealer escaped from a maximum security prison in Australia and reached Mumbai. He lived in the slums for two years, observing and learning quite a bit from the slum dwellers. His book, Shantaram, is going to be made as a movie starring Johnny Depp and Amitabh Bachchan. Usha Alexander has a review.

And this, ultimately, is what Shantaram comes to be about: Love, in all its forms and degrees. The love of our fellows, our parents, our brothers and sisters and friends and mates. The love of ourselves. That most human engagement which drives us, completes us, injures us, heals us, ruins us, saves us. Never pure, simple, or clean, often untrue, it is nevertheless our unavoidable condition and our only hope. For such a tough guy, surprisingly, Roberts never flinches from his subject.

Parmesh Shahani launches his book Gay Bombay: Globalization, Love and (Be)Longing in Contemporary India this week,

..a multi-sited ethnography in an online-offline community, where I examine how Internet technologies, the media industry, audiences and broader socio-historical contexts shape modern Indian gay identity..

…and announces an informal book reading in Delhi. The post also includes some exerpts from the book.

Heartcrossings reviews Lahiri’s new collection of short stories, Unaccustomed Earth

Reading the collection of short stories by Jhumpa Lahiri in Unaccustomed Earth is like unwrapping layer upon layer of a much anticipated gift only to find a mundane trinket in the end. Lahiri seems to take perverse pleasure in playing bad Santa who stuffs the stockings of her readers will coal when in fact she could have easily gratified us with a eight beautiful presents.

Heartcrossings’ post makes a general commentary on Lahiri’s writing style, than talk specifically about the book. For someone like me, who has always had trouble reading Lahiri but could not really put my finger on it, I think Heartcrossings hits the nail on the head.

Samanth reviews Sudeep Chakravarti’s Red Sun, which explores the roots of Naxalism in modern India.

Red Sun is written partly as a round up of contemporary Naxal history, but also partly as a travelogue, as Mr. Chakravarti forays across India and into Nepal to meet government officials, villagers and Maoist rebels, trying to work out exactly how his country should react to Naxal violence. The obvious long-term answer is real, corruption-free development, which can rob the rebels of a popular base of support. But inefficient and worryingly corrupt governance keeps that solution out of India’s reach for at least the next few decades, and keeps those hundreds of millions out of the glow of India Shining.

Gayatri explains why she thinks that the book might be better off titled as The Name is NOT Rajni Kanth.

Let me cite the most glaring error that features in the first few pages of the book itself.

“He began to get noticed in Tamil cinema. His first film as a hero was the blockbuster Apporva Raajmangal. K. Balachandar, his mentor, again cast him as the main lead in a slapstick comedy Moondu Mudichu. And after that there was no looking back to the gradual rise to super stardom.”

Chitra Bannerjee Divakaruni’s Palace of Illusions is a retelling of Mahabharata as seen through the eyes of Draupadi. Vidya Pradhan has a review.

The Mahabharata, which my grandmother claims is the repository of every known story in the universe, is an absorbing drama which is less about good and evil than it is about politics and strategy. It is open to a great deal of interpretation and a perfectly good case can be made for the seemingly reprehensible behavior of the Kauravas led by Duryodhana. The moral ambiguity of this epic makes it a page turner and Divakaruni manages to weave in some of the lesser known anecdotes skillfully. You may even find a nugget or two that is new to you. And just to pique your interest, let me add that there is an unexpected and totally dishy love angle for Draupadi that I have never come across in any other adaptation of one of the greatest stories ever told.

In The Raj Lives, Upadhya has attempted to compensate for lack of originality by quoting a wide range of secondary sources. Yet his choice is far from impeccable. For much of the post-1950 period, he has quoted American news media and other western sources, which had their own profound biases against India as the Cold War was thickening.

Dipankar Biswas reviews Sanjay Upadhya’s book, The Raj Lives - India in Nepal.

The beauty of the book lies in the wide range of examples that Harford has chosen to explain the logic of. Unlike many of the best sellers of the past years, which left you with the distinct feeling that one idea or concept, best suited for a long article, had been pulled and stretched in all possible directions to fill enough pages to call it a book – Harford introduces refreshingly new analyses chapter after chapter.

Surya reviews Tim Harford’s latest economics book, The Logic of Life and provides a reading list inspired by this book [via].