Gulzar’s Raavi Paar And Other Stories: A Collection Both Candid And Cathartic

raavi paar by gulzar

There are hard-boiled writers who put pen to paper or finger to type-writer keys to churn out paperbacks and yet can also write a couplet or two. And then, there are the mellower poets who can write equally enchanting and lyrical lines in their short stories or the occasional novels. Sampooran Singh Kalra, or Gulzar […]

Shashi Tharoor’s Riot: A Novel – Much Agitprop About Nothing

My current opinion of Shashi Tharoor, that of him being more of a dilettante than a dignitary, is, of course, solely a lament of his once-astute gifts of polemic and storytelling, which were found in spades in his single notable work of metaphysical fiction-cum-roman a clef, The Great Indian Novel. The topical resonance of that […]

Ruskin Bond’s Rusty Goes To London

Any Indian bibliophile, who has spent his or her childhood and youth in the company of, say, Oliver Twist being led by the artful Dodger to Fagin’s lair or been held in the thrall of Sherlock Holmes and Dr Watson on their trail to discover the truth hidden in the fog of yet another mystery, […]

The Moor’s Last Sigh by Salman Rushdie

The Moor's Last Sigh

Bombay Penned And Painted On An Epic Canvas Twenty years ago, I discovered, in my knee-high boyhood, that Bombay, as we had always known it by name, was going to be called Mumbai. It was a decision that I did not mind at the time; perhaps innocence and naïveté of that age do not allow for […]

Swami and Friends by RK Narayan

One of my most cherished memories of childhood is when we used to have our school exams. Everybody, I think, can relate to the nervously hurried and harried revisions that preceded them and the jumbled-up feeling of confusion and anxiety that we all felt as those fateful days came close. And I can also say […]

Adapted: Ruskin Bond’s Susanna’s Seven Husbands

To Vishal Bhardwaj’s 7 Khoon Maaf The Oxford Dictionary defines a femme fatale as a ‘very beautiful woman that men find sexually attractive but who brings them trouble or unhappiness’. Unfortunately, in 7 Khoon Maaf, Vishal Bhardwaj is not quite able to grasp that meaning as clearly as he should ideally. Instead of a femme […]

The Great Indian Novel by Shashi Tharoor

Goodish Farce That Could Have Been Great Satire Mr Shashi Tharoor, where are you? Of course, I am aware that you still make headlines these days, albeit mostly on these bustling social networks, but most of the time, it’s nothing but some new elaborate, almost unpronounceable and quite devilishly incoherent word that you share with […]