Scroll has posted an article about the police taking offense at a plastic cow used in an art installation in Jaipur. A couple days ago, Scroll had also published an article by me, recounting a conversation with scholar Wendy Doniger about cows and the beef controversy: Doniger is perhaps the most renowned scholar of Hinduism… Read more »
Posts Categorized: Criticism
Language Se Lafda Nahin Karne Ka
My latest The Bookist column in HT Brunch here.
Self-Help for Academics
In my latest blog for The Chronicle’s Lingua Franca, I write about the widespread suspicion of self-help books and also why it might makes sense for serious writers to write in that genre: In 1997, Alain de Botton published his book How Proust Can Change Your Life. I was charmed by it. I remember using… Read more »
Dear Committee Members
In the inaugural issue of Catapult, I offer advice on how to write a recommendation letter: To Whom It May Concern: I am writing to recommend to you a novel by Julie Schumacher with the marvelous title Dear Committee Members. This is an entertaining epistolary novel made up entirely of that least promising of forms,… Read more »
Roth
I was fortunate to be asked to write about any American classic of my choice for the Library of America: On the right side of my writing desk in my study is a black wooden bookshelf with thick, box-like sections where I keep books I need for my current projects. But on the wall in… Read more »
Partition Lit.
My piece for HT Brunch on the literature of the Partition has a somewhat dissenting take on Manto: In the famous story Toba Tek Singh by Urdu writer, Saadat Hasan Manto, we get a brilliant, biting commentary on the arbitrariness of borders. Manto’s protagonist, Bishan Singh, lives in a lunatic asylum. He doesn’t know whether… Read more »
Teachable Moment
I have written a piece about Claudia Rankine and how she creates teachable moments; for instance, in her commentary on what commentators say about Serena Williams. More generally, the piece is about academe and race: Everything in American public life, when it comes to race relations, serves as a frame for a history of violence… Read more »
First review is in
Kirkus Reviews calls Lunch with a Bigot “an exuberantly inquisitive collection of essays.” The photograph above is of Hanif Kureishi. I’ve put it up here because 1. he is looking good; 2. I have an essay on him in the forthcoming book; 3. I just wrote a review piece on his latest novel, The Last… Read more »
Rats in the New York Times
“A Matter of Rats” calls itself “a short biography of Patna,” the capital city of Bihar, but like Kumar’s other books, it is many (perhaps too many) things at once. A memoiristic essay that strives to reconcile his feelings for his hometown — despair on the one hand and concern on the other, for… Read more »
The Shiver of the Real
I have an article in the latest Caravan on Indian writing in English: The elections had arrived. Each political party presented its manifesto. “Health vans will reach every part of India.” “Necessary legal framework will be created to protect and promote cow and its progeny.” “Every cycle-rickshaw puller will be given an auto-rickshaw or a… Read more »