If Gayathri Sreekanth undertakes her ophthalmological work with the same callous carelessness as her shoddy biography of Tamil film star Rajinikanth (The Name is Rajinikanth), there must be a lot of unfortunate souls moving about in Chennai with blurred vision, or worse, without any vision.

Besides being a pathetic attempt at hagiography, almost every page in the book The Name is Rajinikanth is riddled with spelling errors, grammatical errors, factual errors or arguments that are sheer nonsense.

As every page in this so-called biography amply attests, Gayathri Sreekanth is a literary bimbette who has no more than a passing acquaintance with the English language. If the task of writing in English was too heavy a cross for this dolt to bear, she should have stuck to Tamil and got the book translated.

Great biographies by authors like Carl Sandburg (Abraham Lincoln), William Manchester (Winston Churchill) and David McCullough (Harry Truman) firmly set their subjects in an age and then weave a fine tale that brings both the age and the individual to life.

Neither Rajinikanth nor his milieu, be it the superstar’s early days in Bangalore, his later years in neighboring Chennai or the Tamil movie industry, come to life Continue Reading…

Indian-American writer Jhumpa Lahiri is a joy to read.

We enjoyed reading Namesake. And we thoroughly enjoyed watching the eponymous movie starring Irrfan Khan and Tabu.

Jhumpa, who lives in Brooklyn, has now come out with her new collection of short stories Unaccustomed Earth.

Today’s Wall Street Journal (subscription required) has an interview with Jhumpa.

Here’s an excerpt from the WSJ interview:

I love stories. But I don’t distinguish so much between a short story and a novel. Personally, when I sit down to read a novel or a Chekhov story I’m seeking the same thing: I’m seeking that same rich portrayal of life in words. What I do find frustrating, having written another collection, is this idea that people don’t regard short-story collections as substantial. They think of them as a chocolate box, an assorted thing. You present it, and readers can say, I like that one, that was my favorite, I like the orange cream. Whereas with a novel I think they regard it more as a thing of substance, an entrée, if you will, they don’t pick it apart in terms of the mashed potato part of it and the peas and the meat part, it’s all this thing in concert. It’s not something I can control. I’ve written the book and that’s it.

We are currently reading Parag Khanna’s new book The Second World - Empires and Influence in The New Global Order, the talk of the town these days.

Since we couldn’t wait to do a post on the book, we gave it something like the Washington read (flipping through the index to find what’s of interest). A full review of The Second World will follow after we finish reading the book.

Here’s what we uncovered about Parag Khanna’s take on India - India just does not count.

Khanna does not mince words on India:

India is big but not yet important. Outsourcing has made it a leading back office for Western firms, but except for a few segregated twenty-first century oases of development, India is almost completely third-world, most of its billion-plus people living in poverty. (P.276)

There is more criticism.

China has order and one day may have democracy. India has democracy but achieves less because it is chaotic. The link between trade and development that China exemplifies is almost absent in India. Relative to its geographical and population size, India’s government is almost invisibly weak, with a federal budget the size of Norway’s….The difference between India and China is thus not just the time lag between the advents of their current economic reform eras but also a fundamental matter of national organizational ability. Even if India rises, it will be according to Chinese rules. (P.277)

We think Parag Khanna is on the money where his analysis on India is concerned. Despite all the chest-thumping Continue Reading…

Come on, if you really can’t answer the above question about our hot Bollywood and Kollywood babes, you are just not looking in the right place.

Well, if you are too shortsighted to notice, the short answer is: Namitha, Mallika and Urmila are all booby-traps.

Now, don’t ask us what a boobytrap is.

Ignore the dictionary meaning.

Instead, look at the pictures of these girls. This time, pay attention. Soon, you’ll have your eureka moment.

Having lived long years in both India and the West, we think Indians have a bigger obsession and fascination with breasts as symbols of sexuality than Americans. And bigger the better.

Not surprisingly many of our well known Indian film actresses - yesterday, today and surely tomorrow too - may not act well but they are well endowed.

Kollywood bombshell Namitha, Rangeela girl Urmila, beauty queen Sushmitha and Bollywood sex siren Mallika all owe a fair Continue Reading…

If you love movies as much as we do, you’ll love the book Eyewitness Companions - Film.

For movie buffs, the 501-page book provides a nice introduction to the films business and whets the appetite for more indepth reading.

Besides giving us an overview of the Story of Cinema from 1895 to the present, this book also briefly touches upon the process of making a movie, describes the various movie genres, profiles the 200 top movie directors (dead and alive) from Hollywood to Bollywood, discusses cinema in various countries including India and ends with a guide to the Top 100 movies.

So, if you are too embarrassed to ask anyone about Avant-Garde movies or clueless about Film-Noir, pick up this book.

In the section on India, the author Ronald Bergan writes:

Indian films mean different things to different people. For the majority they mean Bollywood,  and for others they mean exquisite art movies as exemplified by the work of Satyajit Ray. The films of “Bollywood,” a conflation of Bombay, the old name for Mumbai, and Hollywood, are generally rigidly formulaic Hindi-language musicals, comedies, or melodramas.

Besides Satyajit Ray, the section on Indian Continue Reading…

Amazon.com’s new e-book reader Kindle got the thumbs-down in a critical review from Wall Street Journal technology Guru Walter Mossberg today.

Mossberg writes that while he liked the shopping and downloading experience,

the Kindle device itself is just mediocre. While it has good readability, battery life and storage capacity, both its hardware design and its software user interface are marred by annoying flaws. It is bigger and clunkier to use than the Sony Reader, whose second version has just come out at $300.

….the device is poorly designed. It has huge buttons on both edges for turning pages forward or backward. They are way too easy to press accidentally, so my reading was constantly being interrupted by unwanted page turns. Plus, the buttons are confusing. One called “Back” doesn’t actually move to the previous page, but supposedly to the prior function. I never could predict what it would do.

Priced at $400, Kindle lets consumers Continue Reading…

One of the most fascinating books on India is the work Hindu Manners, Customs and Ceremonies by that Christian bigot Abbe Dubois, who traveled widely in South India in the late 18th century and early 19th century.

A resident of India from 1792-1823, Duboi had the opportunity to observe the customs and practices of Hindus, particularly the Brahmin community.

After observing Indians at close quarters for over three decades, Dubois contrasted the licentious habits of Hindu men with the chastity of the Hindu women in his book:

Whatever may be said to the contrary, Hindu women are naturally chaste….I would even go so far as to say that Hindu women are more virtuous than the women of many other more civilized countries. Their temperament is outwardly calm and equable, and though a passionate fire may smoulder underneath, without the igniting spark it will remain quiescent. (Part 2 Ch 12 P.313-314)

But having given the Hindu women the highest compliments, Dubois confesses his inability to explain the reasons for their chastity: Continue Reading…

Amazon.com is set to roll out its much anticipated Kindle e-book reader on Monday kindling hopes that at least this time e-books will take off.

Early reports suggest that Kindle will include a Wi-Fi connection to let consumers connect to Amazon’s e-book store and buy electronic books.

Priced at $399, the Kindle device is also supposed to include a headphone jack for audio-books and let consumers access content from the New York Times, Wall Street Journal and Le Monde.

The first generation of e-book devices had to be connected to a computer to download the electronic books.

The short history of e-books - digital versions of printed books that display on specialized reading devices or on PCs and laptops - is littered with a string of failures that includes both big names and small startups.

So far, only 100,000 e-book readers are said to have been sold in North America.

Readers of this blog with long memories may remember that in the late 1990s several companies including Microsoft, SoftBook, Librius, Glassbook, EveryBook and NuvoMedia threw their hats in the e-book arena but none of them made much headway.

At the world’s first e-book conference in Continue Reading…

Oh boy, oh boy.

As Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh cozies up to the Bush Administration, his youngest daughter Amrit Singh blasts the same administration for borrowing methods from tyrannical regimes (and she is right).

In her new book Administration of Torture, Manmohan Singh’s U.S-based daughter Amrit Singh plunges the dagger deep into the rotting carcass of the Bush administration, twists the knife around and exposes the maggot of lies and evasions surrounding the brutal torture of prisoners by American soldiers in Iraq, Afghanistan and Guantanamo Bay.

Written in a take-no-prisoner style, Amrit Singh and her co-author Jameel Jaffer tell a compelling and shameful story of pervasive torture, abuse and mistreatment of prisoners by the U.S. military in America’s war on terror.

Through meticulous documentation, Amrit Singh and Jameel Jaffer leave no doubt that American servicemen tortured prisoners through beating, sleep deprivation, electrocution, burning, kicking, intimidation with dogs, waterboarding and occasionally by murder.

Some American soldiers, in fact, have gone beyond torture of detainees by engaging in rape and murder of civilians as well. But American soldiers’ atrocities on civilians in Iraq and Afghanistan is a story for another day.

Administration of Torture tears into the Bush administration for merely talking the talk on commitment to democracy and human rights but not walking the walk when it comes to action.

 
Amrit Singh
(Courtesy: ACLU)

A graduate of Yale Law School, Cambridge and Oxford Universities and a staff attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union, Amrit Singh

Continue Reading…

India is both a horror show and a heavenly experience at the same time.

We should know. After all, we’ve watched this confoundingly complex country for over four decades - at close quarters first and then from a distance.

And Paul Theroux knows India well too. He has obviously spent some time there, in the 1970s and presumably recently as well.

And many of Theroux’ observations on the country such as its pettifogging culture, the legal delays, the hypocrisy, the red tape, repressed sexuality et al are very acute in his new book The Elephanta Suite.

India attracted you, fooled you, subverted you, then, if it did not succeed in destroying you with the unxpected, it left you so changed as to be unrecognizable….Or it ignited a fury in you….Or it roused your pity and left you with a sadness that clung like a fever.

While Theroux’ characters see through the veneer of hypocrisy in India and are occasionally cheated and sometimes disappointed, they also feel a strong connection Continue Reading…

Anupama Chopra’s book on Bollywood superstar Shah Rukh Khan may have garnered all the media attention because of her connections but Stephen Alter has written the superior book in Fantasies of a Bollywood Love Thief: Inside the World of Indian Moviemaking.

Fantasies of a Bollywood Love Thief captures the spirit and essence of Bollywood better than any other book we’ve read lately on the Hindi movie industry.

Written against the backdrop of the making of Hindi film Omkara, director Vishal Bharadwaj’s adaptation of the Bard’s play Othello, Bollywood Love Thief provides not just an elaborate look into Bollywood style moviemaking but also a bird’s eyeview of the entire Hindi film industry and some of its dramatis personae.

From the Mahurat (the first shot of a Bollywood production) to star tantrums and the stars’ fitness trainers to star salaries, Alter Continue Reading…

Israeli super spy and assassin Gabriel Allon and his daredevil cohorts are back in Daniel Silva’s new book The Secret Servant.

Allon and his team delighted us in The Messenger, a gripping and often chilling account of an assassination plot against the holiest of holy men - the Pope - right in the Vatican City.

So it was with a great deal of anticipation that we picked up The Secret Servant.

Alas, The Secret Servant is not half as gripping a tale as The Messenger.

As with the Messenger, the enemy in Secret Servant is the ruthless community of Islamic Jihadists.

But that’s where the similarities between the two books end.

Unlike the well drawnout and intricate plot in the The Messenger, the story in Secret Servant is a bit simplistic focusing mostly on the kidnap and rescue of the daughter of the American Ambassador to the United Kingdom.

The trail of locating Elizabeth Halton takes our ruthless agent Gabriel Allon from Israel to the U.K. to Netherlands to Denmark and back to U.K. In between, our peripatetic Allon makes forways to the U.S. (the CIA headquarters in Northern Virginia) and Israel.

In Denmark, Allon almost gets killed by Jihadis during the ransom payment to rescue Elizabeth. Makes him seem almost mortal!

Art expert Sarah Bancroft, who made her first appearance in Messenger,  reappears in Secret Servant but in a much smaller, and almost irrelevant, role.

Secret Servant reads like the writer was in too much of a hurry to flesh out the plot details the way he did it with mastery in The Messenger.