What a pity. But then Devgan also talks about how he likes his culture packaged: “I like knowing about things in whatever format, if it’s a DVD or if it’s a thinner book then it’s fine. Otherwise, I don’t finish it.”Anuradha SenGupta: But did you read Othello to get into the skin of the character Omkara?
Ajay Devgan: Not really…
Mugging on Museum Road? A knife? 21 stitches? What is WRONG with Bangalore?
Michael Holroyd on why we should listen to Shaw today:
Shaw believed that the only revolutions which would not lead to counter-revolutions, landing us back to approximately where we had begun, were bloodless revolutions, revolutions that arose through changing the mind of a country by its writers, philosophers, thinkers, men and women of imagination.
Laura Ghorayeb (via Rockslinga) in “Witnessing (Again):
I am today unemployed because i am an art critic, and in war times, arts don’t flourish. No sculptures, paintings or installations are exposed.
Justin Huggler follows the slum trail in Mumbai for The Independent:
At one point, we come to a street that is flooded, with sewage floating on the surface of kneedeep monsoon rainwater. Sunil skips nimbly down it along bricks and old plastic buckets the locals have left as stepping-stones, gesturing for us to follow. Then, abruptly, we turn a corner and we are in the light again, the other Mumbai, the world of cars and permanent buildings and money, and the slum is just a wretched huddle of huts behind us.
Jhumpa Lahiri on R.K.Narayan (via Moorish Girl):
The concentration of Narayan’s prose is astonishing. While other writers rely on paragraphs and pages to get their points across, Narayan extracts the full capacity of each sentence, so much so that his stories seem bound by an invisible yet essential mechanism, similar to the metrical and quantitative constraints of poetry. Narayan wrote many of these stories under deadline, within the limits of word count and column length for The Hindu, a Madras newspaper for which Narayan had a contract for a weekly submission beginning in 1939. At the same time there is nothing formulaic about them—if anything, they seem spontaneously and effortlessly composed.
Two girls who came to Mumbai with dreams of singing in the Saregama show… and Rs 800 in their hands. Rescued just in time when they jumped into the sea at Ferry Wharf. Back home, their family worried about them, and their father had a heart attack…
Am still preoccupied with too many other things to be able to do more than repost old posts that had dropped off my old blog. Meanwhile, picked up Penguin India’s First Proof 2 on Saturday, and I find that it has poetry by Annie, fiction by Sonia and Chandrahas, an essay by Dilip, and a non-fiction piece on blogging by Arunava Sinha. There are more familiar names, but I haven’t had the time to read any of it yet except a small story by Altaf Tyrewala in which I find the very useful word “Ghantaa!”
“If we had a keen vision and feeling of all ordinary human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow and the squirrel’s heart beat, and we should die of that roar which lies on the other side of silence.”
- George Eliot (Epigraph to “Unless” by Carol Shields)
