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Amit Chaudhuri is one of the best Indian writers in English today. Salman Rushdie may be more flamboyant, but when it comes to describing a scene, Chaudhuri is second to none. He can be as vivid as a photograph or a video. The only reason he is not better known is his short stories and
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The First World War is ancient history now. After all, it ended 90 years ago. November 11 marked the 90th anniversary of the Armistice. Remarkably there are still some old soldiers from that long-ago war. Three centenarians representing the British army, navy and air force attended the ceremony in London, reported the BBC. Remarkable too
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Bill Gates, Paul Allen, Steve Ballmer, Steven Jobs and Sun Microsystems co-founder Bill Joy are all about the same age, says Malcolm Gladwell. So were John Rockefeller, Andrew Carnegie, Jay Gould and JP Morgan, the biggest 19th century tycoons, he adds. Some generations are luckier than others and benefit from extraordinary opportunities, Gladwell writes in
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The writer Ian Buruma says he was approached to write Naipaul’s biography a long time ago. He says this in his review of Patrick French’s biography, The World Is What It Is: The Authorized Biography of V.S. Naipaul. Buruma writes in his article in the New York Review of Books: I was approached in the
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The award for the best English novel by a writer from any country except America goes to… an Indian for the second time in three years! Aravind Adiga has won the 2008 Man Booker Prize worth 50,000 pounds ($87,000) for Commonwealth writers for his novel, The White Tiger, set in India. Indian Kiran Desai won
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I am glad that Singapore Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong spoke at the Global Indian Diaspora Conference this morning. His presence there while Singapore officially went into recession underlines the deepening ties between the two countries. India too is caught in the economic turmoil. Indian banks from tomorrow will be allowed to keep just 7.5
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I would be surprised if this year’s Nobel Prize for Literature goes to any English language writer, for Doris Lessing won the award last year and English language writers have been getting the award every alternate year since 2001 when Naipaul was the winner. But no American writer has won the Nobel since Toni Morrison
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I was floored by this Michael Collins mystery, captivated by its lyricism and intrigued by its plot. A novel nominated for the National Book Award turns out to be eerily similar to the real-life murder of a teenager. But it was written before her death. Suspicion naturally falls on the writer. But he is lying
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Today is Mahatma Gandhi’s 139th birthday. He was shot dead by a Hindu nationalist at a prayer meeting in New Delhi on January 30, 1948, at the age of 78, only five months after India’s independence — for trying to protect the Muslims during the communal riots that followed the partition of India and Pakistan.
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I am surprised that Aravind Adiga’s The White Tiger is on the shortlist for the Booker Prize but not Salman Rushdie’s The Enchantress of Florence. Would anyone want to read The White Tiger a second time? No doubt it’s a clever book but I was repelled by the details. What makes it unusual is that
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