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Bibliophage: Notes on books, film and music

  • Bookplaces
    • Kitabkhana
      Sometimes you really can’t have too much of a good thing. Amrita and Samir Somaiya have done the city an enormous service with their new bookshop, Kitabkhana. Of all the bookshops in the city, it’s this one that has the...

    …more in Bookplaces at BIBLIOPHAGE

  • Books
    • Mind Games with Dennis Lehane
      With Mystic River Lehane catapulted himself to the top of the thriller psychological and mind-games genre. It must have been a very hard act to follow. With Shutter Island, Lehane almost pulls off the ultimate writer’s coup of going one...
    • Wilde At Heart
      Holland is Oscar Wilde’s grandson and, with John Mortimer, in this astonishing book he shows us the enfant terrible (or perhaps by then the eminence grise) of London’s literary circle battling, albeit unwittingly, for his very life. The book contains...
    • Gods, Mongrels And Demons
      Angus Calder’s thesis, summarized on the dust jacket flap, is that the weird deserve centre-stage because these creatures are the zeitgeist of our world and, quite independently, are inherently interesting. He argues that they may even be more telling than...
    • Bookbooks
      Lynn Truss’s “Eats, Shoots and Leaves” turned out to be an utterly delightful discovery. It was a journey into a land I love — punctuation. The lady is endearingly nutty: she once picketed the movie Two Weeks Notice with an...
    • Not So Curious
      Jay McInerney wrote a ravereview in the New York Times of Mark Haddon’s “The Curious Incident of the...

    …more in Books at BIBLIOPHAGE

  • Film
    • The Stuff Of Dreams
      A favourite ploy of film critics out to trash a movie is to attack those who like it, usually by calling them feeble-minded, brainless, immature and so on. Then there are those for whom no film is ever quite good...
    • Thank you John Frankenheimer: Path To War
      The peculiar thing about John Frankenheimer’s work is that it is consistently good. That’s not something one can say about most directors working today. I hope this isn’t a completely odious comparison, but take
    • Kill Bill
      Evidently there are degrees of violence. There is the sleep-wrecking, mind-numbing, stomach-churning, vomit-inducing violence of In Hell (Van Damme and other specimens) or Con Air. And there is the Tarantino brand of...
    • The Life of David Gale
      Alan Parker’s “The Life of David Gale” is a really, really stupid film about a really, really vital subject. Is the Death Penalty justifiable, defensible? When? How does it square with fundamental human rights?

    …more in Film at BIBLIOPHAGE

  • Others

      …more in Essays at BIBLIOPHAGE

    • Readings
      • African Tyrant
        by JOSHUA HAMMER

        Peter Godwin has carved out a niche as a skillful chronicler of politics and war in his native Zimbabwe. His 1996 memoir, “Mukiwa: A White Boy in Africa,” was an affecting account of his coming-of-age in white-minority-ruled...

      • How Gandhi Became Gandhi
        By GEOFFREY C. WARD

        Some years ago, the British writer Patrick French visited the Sabarmati ashram on the outskirts of Ahmedabad in the Indian state of Gujarat, the site from which Mahatma Gandhi led his salt march to the sea...

      • A History of the World in 100 Objects by Neil MacGregor
        by MARY BEARD

        Chapter 33 of Neil MacGregor’s marvellous book-of-the-radio-series is about the Rosetta stone. This lump of granite from Egypt, “about the size of one of those large suitcases you see people trundling around on wheels at airports”, is,...

      …more in Readings at BIBLIOPHAGE

      …more in Viewings at BIBLIOPHAGE

 

Mcavity: Ramblings in MovableType and elsewhere

 

Prisoner of Agenda: From environment to justice, from cabbages to kings. Opinions. Strongly held.

  • Cabbages and Kings
    • Guess What, You've Been Snarked
      There’s a word for it, this feeling of wanting to say something biting and nasty when you catch the day’s news, triggered by a constant sense of absurdity overwhelming logic, of contradictions without consistency, of shifting sands. The word is...
    • A Brief Biography Of Slapping
      Few words have the immediacy of this one. In its first known usage in English, it’s nearly 400 years old, going back to the mid-1630s. Its roots are probably from the very similar Germanic, schlappe, and both are onomatopoeic, suggestive...
    • A Little Bit Of Tintin In Our Lives
      It is hard to imagine our childhoods without him. We lost ourselves in his world. We laughed at the crazy things his friends did, but his struggles and ultimate triumphs were always our own.
    • Clueless in Kochi
      As the volcanic ash-eclipsing dust finally settles on the Modi-Tharoor brouhaha, perhaps it is time for a reassessment of what was won and what was lost. Clearly, this was the theatre of the absurd, and India and its media nearly...
    • An Unsuitable Boy: Shashi Tharoor, India and the UN Secretary-Generalship
      The only time BBC’s congenitally obnoxious Tim Sebastian was thoroughly non-plussed was when he interviewed the redoubtable Nina Simone. While NDTV’s Barkha Dutt is no Sebastian, and Shashi Tharoor no Simone, she, too, seemed competely mesmerized by her subject.

    …more in Cabbages and Kings at PRISONER OF AGENDA

  • Censorship
    • The Assault On Ideas
      In America, there is a furore over SOPA, the Stop Online Piracy Act in Congress, and its sister law in the US Senate, PIPA or Protect IP Act. The internet's Child And Its Nanny
      In the first week of April this year, India’s Department of Information Technology notified drafts of four sets of rules under the Information Technology Act 2000. Two of these, relating to sensitive personal data...
    • The Ascent Of Stupidity
      What could these three things possibly have in common: the appointment of a new head of the censor board, a tax on a music concert and a book a famous Indian figure by a foreign author? It all seems innocuous,...
    • Taking Leave Of Our Censors
      Last week, the Information & Broadcasting Ministry peremptorily ordered two TV channels (Colors and NDTV Imagine) to change the time-slots of their top-rated shows. While the...
    • Burn Without Reading
      “It was a pleasure to burn.”Fahrenheit 451, it is illegal to think; to think, you have to read. Therefore, “… the pigeon-winged books died on the porch and lawn of the...

    …more in Censorship at PRISONER OF AGENDA

  • Cities
    • Every City Its Season
      There are times in the lives of cities when the city seems suddenly to spawn great music, art, literature and architecture. At the turn of the 19th century, Vienna was such a place.
    • The Unquiet City
      1989 was a year of revolutions, one that saw the collapse of several communist states—Poland, Hungary, East Germany, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia and Romania. Except for Romania, the others were singularly bloodless. All succeeded. To the east, another uprising against the communist...
    • Moments in the Life of Bombay
      It’s an easy city to love, a hard one to hate, Mumbai, Bombay, whatever you want to call it. It grates on your nerves one day, and charms you the next. It is irresistible and it is undeniable, and it...

    …more in Cities at PRISONER OF AGENDA

  • Governance
    • A Time To Heal
      Our existing systems for tackling corruption are catastrophic failures. Prosecuting public servants needs prior sanction. It seldom comes. Prosecutions drag on for years. Relative to the (intangible) result, the effort is monumental. If the comparisons to cancer are accurate, is...
    • Rupees, Annas And Vice
      If there exists popular perception that this is a government with an embarrassment of vices — an inexhaustible capacity for corruption, inventive mendacity (the dementia defence), and, it now seems, even gross political ineptitude — the Congress-led UPA has only...
    • Pashas Of Politics, Caliphs Of Culture
      The city’s police are an unhappy lot. It’s bad enough they’ve been forced to pirouette endlessly over the murder of the journalist Jyotirmoy Dey....
    • The Confounding Fathers Of A New Democracy
      Who or what is this “civil society” that has occupied so much airtime and newsprint, and what gives it the right to speak for everyone? Let’s be clear: “civil society” means half a dozen people who, by their own admission,...
    • What We Talk About When We Talk About Corruption
      For all the wide-spectrum, scattershot weaponry they have built into version 2.1 of the Jan Lokpal Bill, Anna Hazare and the core group of supporters of his “movement” have a curiously narrow focus: the only form of corruption targeted is...

    …more in Governance at PRISONER OF AGENDA

  • Judiciary
    • 150 Years Of Fortitude
      It is a remarkable milestone when any single institution anywhere can claim to have functioned for a full 150 years without interruption. When that institution is a court of law, it affords all of us — not just the lawyers...
    • The Judiciary On Vacation. Again.
      In one respect, being a lawyer is very like being a schoolteacher, except that it pays much better. You get vacations. The annual calendar is vitally important: the first thing we do is to look at the red-letter days: long...
    • Reimagining History
      It’s not about Rama. It’s not about Babur. It’s not even about a temple or a mosque. It’s about an assault of a kind we’ve never seen before, on history, law and the truth.
    • Past Imperfect, Future Tense
      It’s a day like any other. There is the usual hectic activity in the squalid room. The furniture is creaky and damaged. There are more people than the room can comfortably hold, and, for a courtroom, there’s an unacceptable level...
    • A Talkative Judge
      For the most part, lawyers in the Karnataka High Court, a stately neo-classical structure in Bangalore’s Cubbon Park, are a restrained and circumspect lot. So when Udaya Holla, a distinguished senior advocate, complains about a judge’s conduct and language, you...

    …more in Judiciary at PRISONER OF AGENDA

  • Justice
    • Where The Truth Lies
      Unless I am very wrong, the date this article appears in print is one of only three such dates every century; and each one is special. 11-11-11, like 10-10-10 and 01-01-01 are all binary in appearance. (Of course, should you...
    • The Burden Of Proof
      It’s one of the three oldest professions known to man. The other two, prostitution and smuggling, are on the wrong side of common social acceptance; and law — criminal law in particular — has always existed in a slightly murky...
    • To Forgive And To Forget
      In early 1977, Jacobo Timerman, the publisher of a liberal newspaper in Argentina, was arrested by the military junta. For some time previously, he had used his newspaper to publish accounts of government brutality and human rights violations. After his...
    • The Right Not To Be Raped
      Come June 25, and if the Baba Ramdev circus and roadshow haven’t hijacked common sense by then, India’s capital is slated to see a protest march of a...
    • The Evil That Men Do
      Titus Andronicus is the bloodiest and most gruesome of Shakespeare’s tragedies; the scholar and critic Clark Hulse, of the University of Illinois and a contributor to the Cambridge Collections,

    …more in Justice at PRISONER OF AGENDA

  • Law
    • Judgement Daze
      What is about judges that so upsets politicians and political columnists? A couple of days ago, one politician referred to High Court and Supreme Court judges Ask The Experts
      We find television shows about lawyers, law firms and crime detection so compelling because we perceive court rooms as arenas for a civilized form of gladiatorial combat. ‘Courtroom’ TV serials show feisty lawyers trading verbal blows against each other and...
    • Minority Report
      Of all the opening words of the Preamble to our Constitution, the most difficult is one that wasn’t even originally there. Till 1977, we were a sovereign democratic republic, recently turned gloomy with Mrs G in the middle of her...
    • Accessing The Law
      As our world gets more complex, so do our statutes. We now have laws for everything from the preservation of wild elephants (1879; seriously) to the running of cybercafes. This statutory morass is confusing and intimidating, and the citizen is...
    • A Question Of Trust, A Matter Of Faith
      Civilization’s future, EM Forster wrote in his July 1941 essay, originally broadcast on BBC, demands something less dramatic and emotional than prattle about love. “Tolerance,” he said, “is a very dull virtue. It is...

    …more in Law at PRISONER OF AGENDA

  • Obituaries
    • The Keeper Of The Faith
      It was the first thing that you noticed in her home. The books. There were books everywhere, on every surface, racked, stacked and piled, novels, histories, coffee table books, old books, new books. Even the furniture seemed to morph itself...

    …more in Obituaries at PRISONER OF AGENDA

  • Society and Culture
    • A Land Beyond Imagining
      It was a typically squalid town in the heart of India’s cowbelt: the usual cats’ cradle of messed-up wiring, open sewers, cracked pavements, blaring horns, loudspeakers on every corner blaring something indecipherable, the air so thick with dust and grime...
    • Where India Shines
      In the summer of 1978, I took a train to Piparia in Madhya Pradesh. As far as I could tell, it was the middle of nowhere. I was straight out of school and was headed for a small village nearby....
    • Sects And The City
      I come from a family of migrants. My paternal grandparents were from Gujarat. My father’s younger brother was born in Karachi. On my mother’s side, the family is very distantly from Gujarat but more recently from Solapur. My mother’s sister...
    • But They Still Stood There, Watching
      Harlan Ellison is an iconic writer of what has come to be known as speculative fiction—not quite science fiction, yet set in a cold-blooded and heartless future. Deathbird Stories, a collection first published in 1974, is something of a cult...
    • Cane And Disable
      If the tragic death of Rouvanjit Rawla, a 13-year-old student of Kolkata’s La Martiniere for Boys, shows us anything it is this: that for all our gleaming buildings and six-lane expressways, we are still stuck in a time warp. It...

    …more in Society and Culture at PRISONER OF AGENDA

 

Silva Rerum: A forest of things

  • Art
    • In Mumbai, a Place to Showcase an Art Collection
      By AMANA FONTANELLA-KHAN | December 29, 2010
      MUMBAI, INDIA — At Ashiesh Shah’s housewarming party in November, amid clinking champagne flutes, one of his friends joked that his apartment is actually an art gallery in disguise. Looking at the sculpture...
    • Reconsidered, a Met Velazquez Is Vindicated
      By CAROL VOGEL | Published: December 20, 2010
      For nearly 60 years the portrait of a baby-faced Philip IV by Velázquez hung in the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s European paintings galleries, a stunning example of the only 110 or so...

    …more in Art at SILVA RERUM

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Notes on books, film and music


Ramblings in MovableType and elsewhere


From environment to justice, from cabbages to kings. Opinions. Strongly held.


A forest of things