Toward the end of the Sakuntala, the most famous of the three surviving plays by Kalidasa–the poet usually considered the finest in ancient India–the hero Dushyanta offers this poignant self-analysis:

Like someone staring at an elephant
who says, “There is no elephant here,”
and who then, as it moves away,
feels a certain doubt
and later, seeing its footprints,
is certain: “An elephant
has been here”–
such are the subtle
workings of my mind.

Or of any mind–the rueful king speaks for all of us. We almost always miss the elephant in front of us. By the time we make our retrospective deduction from the footprints, it’s usually too late. The whole thing here.

(via) Here is the website of the Clay Sanskrit Library.

…can sometimes be delivered in unexpected ways. Not by getting the perfect child that every parent dreams of, but the imperfect one who helps them discover the strength and beauty of their own endurance.”

Manjula Padmanabhan on the Mehta abortion case.

It includes Arvind Adiga (The White Tiger), Amitav Ghosh (Sea of Poppies), Mohammed Hanif (A Case of Exploding Mangoes) and Salman Rushdie (The Enchantress of Florence). Here’s a selection from the chatter:

What one of the judges had to say in a Guardian blog.

Laura Barton on thrillers and the list.

Canongate publisher James Byng doesn’t thinkthe thriller should be there. “I cannot respect a judging committee that decides to pick a book like Child 44, a fairly well-written and well-paced thriller that is no more than that, over novels as exceptional as Helen Garner’s The Spare Room or Ross Raisin’s God’s Own Country,” he wrote on the online forum.

Boyd Tonkin: There are five debut novelists on the list.

Thomas Sutcliffe: Maybe the longlist is all the Booker we should have.

As for Rushdie, according to A.N.Wilson, he and other “humbler scribblers, in common with most people in England, hold him in abhorrence.” Er, including his police minders, one of whom has also written a book… recounting, among other things, how they once locked him in a cupboard and went to a pub. But maybe Rushdie will tell his side of the story too.

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Also here’s the Man Asian Literary Prize longlist, which includes eleven Indian authors in a list of twenty-one. Indians on the list are:
Tulsi Badrinath (”Melting Love”),
Anjum Hasan (”Neti, Neti”),
Daisy Hasan (”The To-Let House”),
Siddharth Dhanvant Shanghvi (”Lost Flamingoes of Bombay”),
Amit Varma (”My Friend, Sancho”),
Sarayu Srivatsa (”The Last Pretence”),
Kavery Nambisan (”The Story that Must Not be Told”),
Sumana Roy (”Love in the Chicken’s Neck”),
Vaibhav Saini (”On the Edge of Pandemonium”),
Rupa Krishnan (”Something Wicked This Way Comes”)
Salma (”Midnight Tales”).

Here’s more about the Indian writers on the list.

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And for those who aren’t on either of the longlists, no need to lose heart: here’s Pothi.com, a new self-publishing website where writers can themselves upload and sell their books online. Techtree has more information here.

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Here is a story of remarkable achievement. Not only in what this young man has achieved, but also in his approach to life.

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A short story by Alice Munro.

A set of musical collaborations by Vikram Seth and Alec Roth.

In Kolkata, a new bookshop - a boi-thek. And Chowringhee in its 100th edition.

The Vodafone Crossword Book Award 2007.

Another writing award, and a shortlist.

Near the beginning of Sea of Poppies, Deeti, the central character, has a vision of the Ibis, the schooner that will eventually carry her away from India. For me, too, the book began in much the same way - except that the vision that was revealed to me was of Deeti herself. Amitav Ghosh’s new novel Sea of Poppies, the first of a proposed trilogy, has just been published.

Paromita’s films Unlimited Girls (94 min.), Q2P (54 min.) and Cosmopolis: Two Tales of A City (14 min.) are available on the site, here.

The website is here.

Neera is a black two month old female pup with beautiful eyes. Her paw was eaten up by maggots but that doesn’t deter from running around n the kennels and making friends with all the dogs. She even befriended Kali who doesn’t like any other dog. She is especially looking for a loving and caring home.

Bandya, a 2 year old male beige colored Pomeranian mix, was found abandoned on Peddar road and was run over. His fracture has healed and he is looking for a good home. He is a quiet dog and loves the attention showered on him.

If you would like to meet the above mentioned dogs, you can see them at the WSD kennels.

Apart from the stupid and irresponsible statements, there’s some execrable language. Here’s a sample: “Over the years there is a series of its high-profiled occupants succumbed to cancer… nothing seems to have ward off the evil”.

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Hmmm. They’ve now changed the title to “A house under cancer’s shadow.” Whatever.

My mother passed away peacefully yesterday morning after a final two-week battle with the cancer. She had fought bravely and well for close to six years. Only the final few days were difficult, and we are grateful that she had a peaceful end, surrounded by her loved ones.

…one of the voices of a generation of middle-class Indian youth facing the choices and frustrations that come with the prospect of growing wealth. More here.

“…I picked him up from the airport. He was standing there sullenly and I said, ‘Dr Livingstone, I presume?’ He went, ‘Yes, yes, yes.’ I took him around for a few days. I had no idea he was romantically involved. Nadira was a good friend of mine, a journalistic butterfly. She was a chirpy little thing, bright, known to a lot of important people…. I mentioned that my sister was a novelist, Bapsi Sidhwa, but he wasn’t interested. When I asked him who his favourite writers were he said, ‘My father.’ Later I sent a letter to him in England, but didn’t get a reply. A friend of mine said maybe my letter contained grammatical mistakes….”

Also note Nadira’s description of how Naipaul proposed:

“When the party was coming to an end, Nadira heard that a girlfriend of Mazdak’s had been present, and an argument began. While she was screaming at him at around 3 am, the telephone rang and a voice said, “Is Margaret there? I have to speak to her.” “Margaret who?” asked Mazdak, and Nadira snatched the telephone, realising who was on the other end. “Come now to the hotel, I need to talk to you,” said Vidia. She refused, but agreed to come at 8.30. Nadira went to bed, furious, and when she arrived at the hotel a few hours later, Vidia was still wearing his clothes from the night before. In her recollection, “He looked wild. His hair was all over the place. I said, ‘Are you OK?’ He asked me not to go, and then he said, ‘Will you consider one day being Lady Naipaul?’ I knew Pat was dying and Margaret was finished…. It was not that I was trying to displace a dying woman and an old floozy…”

The rest, about Naipaul’s treatment of his wife and mistress, is even more sordid.

I believe in literature as a bridge between peoples. I believe curiosity can be a moral quality. I believe imagining the other can be an antidote to fanaticism. Imagining the other will make you not only a better businessperson or a better lover but even a better person.

A campus performance of The Vagina Monologues at the Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Mumbai,
on March 1st and 2nd
at 6:45pm
at the Naoroji (new) Campus, Deonar, Mumbai.

The production is student-acted and has been directed communally by all the students involved. The proceeds from the show will be forwarded to SNEHA, which works with women and children who are victims/survivors of domestic violence in Dharavi. This is the first authorised campus performance of the play in South Asia this year, and is done completely by non-actors.

And now, two months and a haircut later, he’s off to school…

Desh now has a baby brother. Here’s a first look at little Megh, who arrived on Saturday 12 January.

Yes of course we must celebrate Bandra. If we can get there, that is. I spent an hour and a quarter getting there to meet Nalini Jones who has just published a book of short stories based on Bandra. So when I decided to see the play “Jazz,” based on Goan jazz musicians (researched by Naresh Fernandes) I left an hour earlier, only to find the entire area had suffered a power failure. We milled around in the dark, with everyone remarkably good-natured about it all. The play could only begin an hour later than scheduled.

Traffic and power cuts are all in a day’s work. What’s surprising was to find Bandra described online, as a “small Catholic town in rural India.” (Introduction to interview with Knopf editor Carol Janeway), and “a Catholic town in India” elsewhere. And there was Amit Chaudhuri, for whom there can be no excuse, putting his foot in it again. “Nalini Jones,” he says in a review, “writes about the marginal community of Christians in Bombay and the neighbourhoods in which they live.

To the outsider, these seem to possess a fabled calm, but the insider knows they are in many ways on the brink of dissolution.” I don’t know whether Chaudhuri means Christians are on the brink of dissolution, or the neighbourhoods in which they live are.

Does Chaudhuri see himself as the insider who knows? Eunice de Souza wonders.

On FRIDAY 7th December
Please join us to celebrate the launch of Anjum Hasan’s brilliant debut novel, set in Shillong, Lunatic in My Head, published by Zubaan and Penguin Books India. The author will be in conversation with Siddhartha Deb, author of Surface and Point of Return.
All are welcome, but seating is limited, so do come early and join us for tea from 6:30 onwards, at The Attic (above The Shop), 36 Regal Building, Sansad Marg (Parliament Street), New Delhi 110 001.
And if you’d like to order the book, you can do so via our website.

On Saturday 8th December
Zubaan is co-hosting a discussion about Masculinities and Literature, entitled Let’s Talk Men. Panellists: Rana Dasgupta, Anjum Hasan, Mukul Kesavan and Geetanjali Shree.
Venue: ML Bhartia Auditorium, Alliance Francaise, 72 Lodi Estate, New Delhi
Time: 6:00pm
For more information about this, and the other events during this week, click here or call 91-11-46057340, or 41640681

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Email from PEN All-India Centre:

THE PEN ALL-INDIA CENTRE announces a new monthly feature, “Spiritlevel@PEN” - a forum for the critical yet sympathetic discussion of the questions of philosophy, religion, spirituality, mystical quest and the many dimensions of being that lie beyond the rigid binary of belief vs rationalism. The inaugural edition of Spiritlevel@PEN hosts THE VENERABLE LHAKDOR-LA speaking on ‘Faith and Reason in the Dharma’

Date: 13 December 2007 (Thursday)
Time: 6.15 pm
Place: Theosophy Hall (3rd floor), 40 New Marine Lines, Churchgate, Mumbai 400 020

The Venerable Lhakdor-la is the former official translator of His Holiness the Dalai Lama, and is the author and translator of numerous books. In 2000, he was appointed a member of the Advisory Board of the Institute of Tibetan Classics, Montreal ; from 2002, he has been Honorary Professor at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver , Canada. The Ven. Lhakdor-la will be introduced by ASPI MISTRY, member, Executive Committee of the PEN All-India Centre and President of the Dharma Rain Centre.

“Come on, why should lawyers defend someone who is so ‘obviously guilty’?”

Although this may sound like self-serving lawyer-talk, the question of guilt, “obvious” or otherwise, is for the court and not for the lawyer — or for the press…

Oh, I did all the things that one was supposed to do – starting with making sure that I was indeed pregnant, and hadn’t just missed a day or two of my period. I bought a dozen home-testing kits, checked without fail every morning, from days before my period was due to several days after. I even kept the little white plastic discs through the day, scanning them irrationally to see if a second line had suddenly appeared on any of them even though the kit advised waiting only five minutes.

And then, when the second line did appear, faint and almost-not-there, I didn’t miss it. I didn’t try to tell myself that it wasn’t there. I noted it, picked up the phone to call my husband, and then looked up the gynaecologist’s telephone number in the book.

And yet. And yet.

Somewhere inside me, I was asking: is that second line really there? I couldn’t be sure.

I showed the testing disc to my husband that evening. Sure, it’s clearly there, he said.

I didn’t believe him, of course.

As I didn’t believe the clinic when the blood and urine tests came back positive, when they opened a new file for me, and when I was given a little folder with a list of Dos and Don’ts for the first three months.

Three months? I was sure I would never make it that far.

I took my folic acid and multivitamins, ate almonds and apples, and drank milk. Okay, I didn’t drink milk – but I ate dahi and drank buttermilk. I lay in bed and rested and read novels. I listened to music. I even listened to a Garbh Sanskar CD that someone passed on to my mother for me. Okay, I listened once.

And I played with my beautiful Baby No 1, watching him stand up, then cruise holding on to furniture, and then start taking his first shaky steps on his own, his little arms flapping like a bird and stomach stuck out – and I thought, this is beautiful. This is it. This is all the baby I need. Even if…

That was the problem. The “Even if…” It had stayed with me all along, through all the doctor’s appointments, the ultrasounds, the blood tests, the triples, and the 3-D scans. Oh, even through the amniocentesis. And I looked at the ultrasound after the amnio which showed the baby moving around freely – and I wondered how it could be true.

Everything’s just great, the doctor would say cheerfully, every single time – and I wouldn’t believe him. Can you hear the heartbeat, they would say – and those horses would gallop, gallop, gallop – and I would nod, yes, and smile.

And I wouldn’t believe any of it.

It wasn’t that I was totally crazy. I wasn’t trying to be ghoulish. Part of me was listening very carefully. Part of me was noting down questions I needed to ask at my next appointment with the gynaecologist. Picking up the cord-blood banking brochure for later use. Pulling myself through the nausea, wincing at the pelvic discomfort, elevating my feet to reduce the oedema. Reducing salt intake, then giving it up altogether.

Part of me was thrilling to every butterfly movement, every kick, every rustle in there. Part of me was patting my belly and running my hands over it and telling the little baby in there that I loved it. Part of me was saying that it was possible to have it all - the adopted child, the biological child, the career, the animals, the full and fulfilling life.

And part of me was preparing Baby No 1 for the arrival of his little sibling. “When Small Baby arrives,” I would croon to him a couple of times a week. When Small Baby arrived, we would all go down to the garden together every day. When Small Baby arrived, we would show it the flowers and the butterflies. When Small Baby arrived…

But the other part of me was watchful, guarding against another miscarriage, another project that would end in a bloody mess, painful cramps, a cold emptiness, and a shortlist of names that would never be used by us for another baby. I didn’t want to go through that again; and I didn’t want my first baby, the one who was already here and who had never seen unhappiness, to see any of the mess. And so I decided that it wasn’t true, any of it.

Until the day I fell.

It was the silliest thing. A lift door, a freshly mopped floor, me rushing to get to the car - wearing the slippery new shoes that I had bought because of the oedema. It was inevitable. I fell. Luckily I fell on my back and my elbow – ouch – and I don’t remember much after that, but I somehow seem to have collected myself and made my way back to our apartment. I stumbled into the house, got into bed and called up the doctor. He sounded non-committal. I would have to go around to the clinic for a scan. The earliest they could do the ultrasound was noon.

I waited. And waited and waited and…there was no movement inside. Everything was hushed and still. I cuddled Baby no 1 and waited. I waited until I didn’t think I could wait any longer.

Then I remembered something. I asked for a glass of cold water. Didn’t Baby No 2 usually do a little jig whenever I drank cold water?

I drank the water. A moment, two, three… and then? Suddenly – the barest whisper of a movement. And another one. And a kick. And another, until Baby No 2 was doing a little breakdance in there…

I breathed again. And cuddled Baby No 1 tighter.

I was pregnant, after all. When Small Baby comes, I whispered to Baby No 1…

And when they did the ultrasound that day, and I heard the heartbeat, I listened to what Baby No 2 was telling me.

Days of rest followed, and more tests, and another scan, but I already knew, deep down inside. I was pregnant, and it was okay to believe in it.

As you might know we have already brought out two issues of Urban Voice, the literary magazine. Now the third issue is due… for which we seek contributions in the form of non-fiction, journalism, short fiction, plays and poetry for this issue. The underlining theme for this issue will be Writers and Cities… The pieces should be around 1,000 -1,500 words, though exceptions may be considered. More details at www.frogbooks.net