The Literary City: Recent Episodes
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EXPLOCITY PODCASTS presents The Literary City With Ramjee Chandran. This podcast is devoted to words—written, spoken or signed. Words rule everything...song lyrics, a movie script, a play, prose, poetry or a podcast. We will feature readers and writers, publishers, people of prose and poetry and playwrights. The Literary City podcasts will feature English language teachers, grammar police, literary lounge lizards...and, oh yes, a cunning linguist or ten.
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For No Reason At All is a thinly fictionalised version of a very interesting and a very real story. High stakes and high intrigue—the story follows a young, feckless lobbyist, Solly Nilla, who is tossed into a situation that attracts the involvement of foreign interests including the embassies of France and the Soviet Union. And eventually, the direct involvement of then Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi and the President of India, R Venkataraman.
The Prime Minister must decide if he will standby locally developed technology or allow a government department to import technology from the Americans.
The novel is written in the genre of spy thrillers—pacy, tense, and funny to the point of hilarious. And it captures the New Delhi of the 1980s in the ambience of the Cold War and an omnipotent bureaucracy and a powerful national press. And the last phases of a sexually permissive era.
In this episode, Ramjee Chandran becomes a guest. The show is co-hosted by The Literary City co-host Pranati Madhav and guest host, Karthik Venkatesh, Executive Editor of Penguin.
Buy For No Reason At All here: https://amzn.to/3DWE1Hj. Or at your favourite bookshop anywhere.
ABOUT RAMJEE CHANDRAN
Journalist, author and media entrepreneur with decades of experience, he is the host of The Literary City podcast—on literature and books, featuring guests who include acclaimed authors; and The History of Bangalore podcast about the rich history of his home city, Bangalore.
He is currently working on his second book, The History of Bangalore—a scholarly work crafted as narrative history. This meticulously researched account spans the region's deep-rooted past, beginning in prehistoric times and tracing through epochs of transformation and cultural significance, traversing across its colonial heritage.
ABOUT KARTHIK VENKATESH
Author of "10 Indian Languages and How They Came to Be" and "10 Makers of the Indian Constitution: Stories of 10 Indians Who Shaped the Nation", Karthik Venkatesh grew up in Bangalore, speaking Tamil, Malayalam, Kannada, English, Dakhani and Hindi. He tried to learn French but failed. He did learn Punjabi though. Once an MBA, he later studied education and taught English and History in a school. He now edits for a living and writes whenever the fancy strikes him. Karthik lives in Bangalore. On weekday mornings, he often runs. On weekends, he naps.
PRAISE
"Ramjee Chandran is among the most elegant writers we have. We are fortunate he has brought his talents to fiction. What writers want, above all, is material and this novel is what happens when a proper writer assembles his material."
—Aakar Patel, author and journalist"
"Debonair, stylish and uproariously witty, For No Reason at All reads like you have ringside tickets to the pandemonium of 1980s India—narrated to you alone, by the most sparkling of raconteurs"
—Anirudh Kanisetti, historian and author.
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We Indians often wear our heritage with pride, but how much of it do we truly understand?
William Dalrymple’s latest book, The Golden Road, charts the extraordinary journey of Indian ideas, knowledge, art, and religion as they shaped cultures across Asia, the Middle East, and Europe. In this episode we explore the Indosphere—where Indian culture thrived beyond its borders—and uncover how these rich exchanges left an indelible mark on world history.
William was my guest almost two years ago on this show. And now, I am honoured to have him back here today, to talk about this fascinating book that uncovers the lost glory of India—The Golden Road.
ABOUT WILLIAM DALRYMPLE
William Dalrymple is one of Britain’s great historians and the bestselling author of the Wolfson Prize-winning White Mughals, The Last Mughal, which won the Duff Cooper Prize, and the Hemingway and Kapuscinski Prize-winning Return of a King.
A frequent broadcaster, he has written and presented three television series, one of which won the Grierson Award for Best Documentary Series at BAFTA. He has also won the Thomas Cook Travel Book Award, the Sunday Times Young British Writer of the Year Award, the Foreign Correspondent of the Year at the FPA Media Awards, and been awarded five honorary doctorates. He is a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, the Royal Asiatic Society and the Royal Society of Edinburgh, and has held visiting fellowships at Princeton, Brown and All Souls, University of Oxford. He writes regularly for the New York Review of Books, the New Yorker and the Guardian. In 2018 he was presented with the prestigious President’s Medal by the British Academy for his outstanding literary achievement and for co-founding the Jaipur Literature Festival. He is the co-host of chart-topping podcast Empire with Anita Anand. Dalrymple lives with his wife and three children on a goat farm outside Delhi.
Buy The Golden Road here: https://amzn.to/42aNNiD
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This special edition of The Literary City is a conversation about the transformative power of the arts—particularly the visual arts. Often misunderstood or overlooked, the arts hold the potential to nourish the mind and soul, offering cultural insights that resonate deeply with our lives today.
In this episode, guest host Kamini Sawhney sits in for Ramjee Chandran. She speaks to Dr. Alka Pande, a distinguished art historian, curator, teacher, and writer whose work spans over three decades. Known for her ability to make complex ideas relatable, Dr. Pande has delved into themes of gender identity, sexuality, and traditional arts, engaging audiences with her thought-provoking research and accessible storytelling.
In this episode, we also discuss her monumental project, 108 Portraits of Indian Culture & Heritage, an encyclopedic 14-volume series exploring the evolution of Indian art and aesthetics across disciplines like music, dance, sculpture, architecture, crafts, and photography.
Join us as we uncover the relevance and richness of Indian art through the lens of one of its most passionate champions.
ABOUT ALKA PANDE
Dr. Pande’s journey began at Punjab University, where she taught art history for over 20 years. Her academic path took her to London’s Goldsmiths, University of London, on the Charles Wallace award to study critical art theory. Upon returning to India, she revitalised the Visual Arts Gallery at the India Habitat Centre in Delhi, establishing it as a hub for modern and contemporary art. She has also contributed to the development of cultural spaces like the Bihar Museum, Udaipur City Palace, and Kanha Museum in Madhya Pradesh.
As an author, Dr. Pande is celebrated for exploring subjects often avoided, such as sensuality and eroticism in Indian art and culture. Her acclaimed works include Ardhanarisvara: The Androgyne Probing the Gender Within, Body Sutra, Shringara: The Many Faces of Indian Beauty, and Phallus: A Cultural History. Through her writing, she challenges colonial and voyeuristic narratives, presenting an authentic understanding of these themes in Indian culture.
ABOUT KAMINI SAWHNEY
Kamini Sawhney is a seasoned museum professional with nearly 15 years of experience. In 2022, she became the first Indian elected to the Board of CIMAM (International Committee for Museums and Collections of Modern Art).
Until April 2024, Sawhney served as the founding Director of the Museum of Art & Photography (MAP) in Bangalore, India's tech capital. Under her leadership, MAP redefined the museum experience for Indian audiences, emphasising inclusivity and accessibility. She also guided MAP’s digital-first launch in December 2020.
Previously, Sawhney headed the Jehangir Nicholson Art Foundation (2011–2019), one of India’s premier private collections of modern art, housed at the Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj Vastu Sangrahalaya (CSMVS) in Mumbai. She has fostered collaborations with institutions like Tate (London), Foam (Amsterdam), Duke University (Durham), and the British Museum (London).
Sawhney’s work continues to bridge audiences and institutions, championing art as a space for dialogue, learning, and connection.
BUY 108 Portraits of Indian Culture & Heritagehere: https://amzn.to/4gqwrTn
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As writers, we know that how we say something matters as much as what we say. The right words, arranged with care, can influence thought and stir emotion—or so we hope.
The divide between creative prose and academic jargon was once stark. But then came the 1970s and 80s, when scientists like Isaac Asimov, Arthur Clarke, Carl Sagan, and Stephen Hawking showed us how to bridge that gap. Their books demystified science and made it thrillingly accessible. They kicked the doors down for voices like Neil deGrasse Tyson to follow.
Today, writers are doing this for history, medicine, and other fields once confined to the academy. They go beyond dry facts and use storytelling to make these subjects come alive. In history, we call this narrative history—a way of weaving the past into a compelling story that connects us to the humanity of those who lived it.
Anirudh Kanisetti is one such writer. His debut book, Lords of the Deccan, has earned critical acclaim for its engaging blend of scholarship and storytelling. He humanizes historical figures, breathing life into their struggles and triumphs, and makes medieval politics accessible to all.
In this episode of The Literary City, Anirudh joins me from New Delhi to talk about Lords of the Deccan, his upcoming book on the Cholas, and the craft of writing history that resonates.
Doesn't this promise to be a fascinating conversation... so dive in.
ABOUT ANIRUDH KANISETTI
Anirudh Kanisetti is an award-winning history researcher and writer. He writes the weekly 'Thinking Medieval' column for The Print. His work has received grants from the Princeton Center for Digital Humanities and the India Foundation for the Arts. His writings and work have been featured in The Hindu, Open, The New Indian Express, and LiveMint, among others. Anirudh was formerly Editor at the Museum of Art and Photography and Associate Fellow at the Takshashila Institution. He hosts three popular and critically acclaimed podcasts – Echoes of India, Yuddha and The Altar of Time.
Buy Lords Of The Deccan here: https://amzn.to/3OJs1uv
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Much of what we understand about global trends is filtered through the lens of the United States. What happens there often shapes thought, culture, and society worldwide. And when it comes to shaping thought, few have had the impact of my guest today: Malcolm Gladwell.
Gladwell, the bestselling author of The Tipping Point, Blink, and Outliers joins me to discuss his new book, Revenge of the Tipping Point. This latest work re-examines the ideas that made him famous—sometimes expanding on them, sometimes rejecting them outright.
We delve into the Broken Windows theory, one of the concepts at the heart of The Tipping Point. It famously inspired crime-prevention policies in New York City, but also led to the controversial practice of stop-and-frisk. Just last month, Gladwell publicly apologised for his role in promoting these ideas, and today, we unpack that apology and the lessons learned.
In Revenge of the Tipping Point, Gladwell takes a hard look at the dark undercurrents of societal change. It’s a fascinating conversation about the power of ideas, their unintended consequences, and how they continue to shape the world. Let’s go.
ABOUT MALCOLM GLADWELL
Malcolm Gladwell is the author of seven New York Times bestsellers: The Tipping Point, Blink, Outliers, What the Dog Saw, David and Goliath, Talking to Strangers, and The Bomber Mafia. He is also the co-founder of Pushkin Industries, an audio content company that produces the podcasts Revisionist History, which reconsiders things both overlooked and misunderstood, and Broken Record, where he, Rick Rubin, and Bruce Headlam interview musicians across a wide range of genres. Gladwell has been included in the Time 100 Most Influential People list and touted as one of Foreign Policy’s Top Global Thinkers. Previously, he was a staff writer for The New Yorker. He graduated from the University of Toronto, Trinity College, with a degree in history. Gladwell was born in England and grew up in rural Ontario. He lives in New York.
Buy Revenge Of The Tipping Point here: https://amzn.to/4ifYtlA
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In this episode of The Literary City, we embark on a journey with two distinguished guests—each bringing a unique perspective to our exploration of literature and language.
Abhay K, a poet-diplomat, and the author of "Celestial," a poetic masterpiece comprising 100 couplets that intricately weave the enchanting tales of the 88 constellations in our galaxy. Abhay's journey into the realm of poetry was sparked by a mesmerising night beneath the southern skies during his tenure as the Indian ambassador to Madagascar. His book "Celestial" stands as a testament to the wondrous inspiration found in the cosmos, beautifully complemented by illustrations from the renowned 10th-century Persian astronomer, Abd al-Rahman al-Sufi, known as Azophi in the West. Through his return to our show, we anticipate delving deeper into the celestial wonders that continue to captivate both poet and audience alike.
Later in the popular segment WHAT'S THAT WORD—with co-host Pranati “P with an A” Madhav—we are joined by Karthik Venkatesh, an Executive Editor at Penguin and the author of the enlightening book "10 Indian Languages And How They Came To Be." Karthik's book is a trove of knowledge, with each page resembling a rich chapter brimming with insights into the origins and evolution of Indian languages. What strikes me the most about Karthik's work is the depth of research—evident from years of accumulated knowledge and experience. As an editor himself, Karthik has skillfully distilled this wealth of information into a concise yet impactful narrative, shedding light on languages both familiar and obscure to India.
This is an action-packed and intellectually stimulating episode of The Literary City.
ABOUT ABHAY K
Abhay K. is a poet-diplomat, translator, and author of several poetry collections. His poems have appeared in over a hundred literary magazines. His “Earth Anthem” has been translated into over 150 languages. He received the SAARC Literary Award and was invited to record his poems at the Library of Congress, Washington, D.C., in 2018. His translations of Kalidasa’s Meghaduta and Ritusamhara from Sanskrit won him the KLF Poetry Book of the Year Award.
ABOUT KARTHIK VENKATESH
Karthik Venkatesh grew up in Bangalore, speaking Tamil, Malayalam, Kannada, English, Dakhani and Hindi. He tried to learn French but failed. He did learn Punjabi though. Once an MBA, he later studied education and taught English and History in a school. He now edits for a living and writes whenever the fancy strikes him. Karthik lives in Bangalore. On weekday mornings, he often runs. On weekends, he naps.
Buy Celestial: https://amzn.to/49Ba6iu
Buy 10 Indian Languages: https://amzn.to/3Tlg6Gt
The similarities between Brahui in Pakistan and Tamil: https://youtu.be/97pwj5AslIw?si=YO52pQEvuu9f0-9i
WHAT'S THAT WORD?!
Co-host Pranati Madhav "Pea" joins Ramjee Chandran in the fun etymology segment, "WHAT'S THAT WORD?!" where they discuss the word “PATOIS”.
CONTACT USReach us by mail: theliterarycity@explocity.com or simply, tlc@explocity..com
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The Story Chaser
This is a journey along the way of writing my first book. I will be telling some...
Listen on: Apple Podcasts Spotify
My guest today is a titan of Indian history, Ramachandra Guha.
He is known for his monumental works on Gandhi and Indian history, but today we're taking a detour into the realm of literature.
We'll be diving into his latest book, "The Cooking Of Books," a slice-of-life memoir that offers a poignant glimpse into his relationship with his first editor, Rukun Advani. It also offers us a look into Ram's literary side and the bonds that have shaped his writing journey.
My first encounter with Ram Guha’s writing—and I have probably read every book he has written, other than his books on cricket—was what could have been the start of his own intellectual odyssey, "Savaging the Civilized". I was carrying a freshly purchased copy of it into our favourite cafe in Bangalore, Koshy’s, and Ram jabbed approvingly at it.
That book captures him, beyond his geographical roots and into a profound intellectual depth—a passion for colonial critiques, insightful biographies, and an unwavering commitment to social justice.
It is refreshing not to have to interview Ram Guha about Gandhi, or any other history, sociology or politics but rather about his prodigious output— in books, columns in newspapers and publications—and what must constitute a lifetime of learning.
And it begs the question: what drives him as a historian? Is it the solitary pursuit of knowledge, the quiet contemplation he once described as "staring out of the window with a blank piece of paper in front of him"?
This ethic is wonderfully captured in his latest book, "The Cooking Of Books". The title hints at the profound collaboration in editing a manuscript, a process he celebrates through his long-standing association with Rukun Advani.
And now to the conversation.
ABOUT RAMACHANDRA GUHARamachandra Guha is a distinguished historian and author of several acclaimed books, including "India After Gandhi" and "The Unquiet Woods." He has received numerous awards, including the Leopold-Hidy Prize and the Fukuoka Prize for contributions to Asian culture. Currently a Distinguished University Professor at Krea University, Guha's intellectual breadth spans environmental history, biographies, and socio-political commentary.
Buy The Cooking of Books: A Literary Memoir here: https://amzn.to/42N3afA
WHAT'S THAT WORD?!Co-host Pranati "Pea" Madhav joins Ramjee Chandran in the fun etymology segment, "WHAT'S THAT WORD?!" where they discuss the word “HISTORY”.
CONTACT USReach us by mail: theliterarycity@explocity.com or simply, tlc@explocity..com
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The Story Chaser
This is a journey along the way of writing my first book. I will be telling some...
Listen on: Apple Podcasts Spotify
My guest today, is an author from Turkiye, Firat Sunel. He is a career diplomat. He is currently the Turkish Ambassador to India.
Firat is a demonstrably fascinating novelist. His latest novel, “The Lighthouse Family”, is a wonderful example of storytelling, of craft and of everything literary. I venture to say without qualification that it is one of the best novels I have read in recent years.
Because this novel embraces a universally-resonant human sentiment, it makes it relatable across cultures, to anyone anywhere, even if the story it tells is set deep in rural Turkiye.
We'll delve into the unique blend of ethnic authenticity and international appeal that characterizes contemporary Turkish literature, tracing its evolution from folk tales to modern intellectual prose. From the reforms of Kamal Atatürk to the global recognition spurred by Orhan Pamuk's Nobel Prize, Turkish literature has garnered increasing attention on the world stage.
Firat Sunel is a product of the rich Turkish literary heritage.
I had the opportunity of a conversation with him (together with the Lithuanian Ambassador Diana Mickevičienė) live at the Bangalore Literature Festival; and today I have the privilege of having him as my guest here—another conversation I am eager to have.
To that end, joining me from his home in New Delhi is the Ambassador to India from Turkiye, Firat Sunel.
Buy THE LIGHTHOUSE FAMILY: https://amzn.to/47NB3hh
ABOUT FIRAT SUNEL
Turkish diplomat, lawyer, scriptwriter, and author he studied law at Istanbul University and did his postgraduate at Bochum ruhr university in Germany. As a diplomat, he served in several countries and is now in New Delhi as Turkiye’s ambassador to India
His novels include Salkım Söğütlerin Gölgesinde [In the Shade of the Weeping Willows, 2011] which inspired a tV series called Büyük Sürgün Kafkasya [The Great Exile Caucasia], İzmirli [Izmirli, My Last Love, 2015] and Sarpıncık Feneri [The Lighthouse Family, 2020].
WHAT'S THAT WORD?!
Co-host Pranati "Pea" Madhav joins Ramjee Chandran in the fun etymology segment, "WHAT'S THAT WORD?!" where they discuss the word “DIPLOMAT”.
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Reach us by mail: theliterarycity@explocity.com or simply, tlc@explocity..com
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The Story Chaser
This is a journey along the way of writing my first book. I will be telling some...
Listen on: Apple Podcasts Spotify
You know how some people just seem to have that star quality? Winston Churchill, he was one of those. No matter how many books, documentaries you may have imbibed—or, speaking of imbibed, tales you may have heard of his brandy-infused mornings, there's always an insatiable appetite for more and more Churchill.
His wit, his wisdom, and yes, even his lack of a filter in his shock-jock pronouncements—all adds up to a mystique, often a respect, that even the former colonies do not deny. Maybe the respect comes from his sense of personal conviction and his uncompromising dedication as a patriot. And not the least because he is credited with defeating Adolf Hitler.
Churchill's desire not to let India go seemingly bordered on obsession. Even when he wasn't steering the ship in India he was always with one eye on the country that made the Empire, well, the empire.
Today, to guide me through understanding Churchill and India, I have the privilege of talking to my guest—renowned historian and author, Walter Reid—whose new book, Fighting Retreat, unravels the layers of Churchill's impact on the Indian subcontinent.
From Churchill’s privileged though unconventional background, through the many accusations against him for being a racist and being cold-hearted, there’s also his apparent compassion for the underdog. As an example, his support for the Dalit cause.
In 1917, The Montagu Declaration marked a turning point in British ownership of India. The Irwin Declaration of 1929 tried to paper over its deficiencies. And then as one thing led to another in the 30 eventful years between 1917-1947, between Montagu-Chelmsford and independence, Churchill stoutly opposed any countenance of an India independent of the Empire.
He once spoke of the three factions—of Hindus, princely states, and Muslims—being the metaphorical "three-legged stool" upon which Britain sat indefinitely.
Was this divide and rule? Or was this good administrative strategy? How did it all pan out? I cannot wait to ask Walter Reid and to delve into the intricate relationship between the icon Winston Churchill and the complex tapestry of India.
Buy Fighting Retreat: https://amzn.to/3Rb1mHF
ABOUT WALTER REID
Walter Reid is a historian educated at the universities of Oxford and Edinburgh, a fellow of the Royal Historical Society, and the author of a number of acclaimed books on British politics and history, including Keeping the Jewel in the Crown: the British Betrayal of India and most recently Neville Chamberlain: The Passionate Radical. He raises sheep and cattle in Scotland and grows olives in France. He is married to Janet Reid, a journalist, and has two adult daughters.
WHAT'S THAT WORD?!
Co-host Pranati "Pea" Madhav joins Ramjee Chandran in the fun etymology segment, "WHAT'S THAT WORD?!" where they discuss the word “QUISLING” and Churchill’s wit.
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The Story Chaser
This is a journey along the way of writing my first book. I will be telling some...
Listen on: Apple Podcasts Spotify
In what is meant to be his quiet and reflective corridor of retirement, my guest today, Abhijit Sengupta grapples with a disquiet that lingers. A former senior IAS officer and therefore, you might say, a custodian of order and democracy, a lifetime of service to the nation has clearly left him with a profound sense of duty that refuses to retire with him.
Abhijit’s expression of angst—a visceral response to the erosion of the democratic foundations that he cherished—has resulted in his latest book, The Queen of All Nations. A response to what he sees as the foundations of democracy that are being visibly eroded with every headline and each policy shift, serving up yet another dissonant note in a score he thought he knew by heart.
It is understandably difficult for anyone to come to grips with the realisation that the ideals he held dear are slipping through the cracks of a society in a time of ideological polarisation.
So, amidst all this angst, Abhijit Sengupta becomes a reluctant activist in this shifting landscape of incipient fascism and rising fundamentalism. But he channels his efforts not as a lament for a bygone era but as something of a rallying cry for the return of ideals. With the optimism that the spirit of a plural, democratic society can endure if those who believe in it refuse to be silent witnesses to its demise.
The Queen of All Nations is more than a historical narrative. It's a call for greater awareness of history and what got us here. It is a poignant reflection on the anguish of this intellectual in a world grappling with political turmoil.
And, as a comfortable read, the book serves as a lighthouse for readers of the younger generation whom he takes on a sweeping journey through the annals of modern India, delving into the intricate political landscape, social upheavals, and cultural transformations that have shaped the nation's identity.
To discuss his book, his ethic and his state of mind, he joins from his home in Bangalore, a city we share.
Buy The Queen Of All Nations: https://amzn.to/3sDCh09Buy A to Z: https://amzn.to/49QmM5FRead Ramjee Chandran’s review of A to Z: https://bit.ly/3T0JWQS
ABOUT ABHIJIT SENGUPTAAbhijit Sengupta joined the Indian Administrative Service in 1972 and retired in 2008 as Secretary, Ministry of Culture, Government of India. He has Master's degrees in Public Administration from Carleton University, Ottawa, Canada, and in English Literature from Delhi University. He received the prestigious Pearson fellowship of the IDRC, Canada in 1984-85 to study Public Administration.
WHAT'S THAT WORD?!
Co-host Pranati "Pea" Madhav joins Ramjee Chandran in the fun etymology segment, "WHAT'S THAT WORD?!" where they discuss the "FULL STOP."
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The Story Chaser
This is a journey along the way of writing my first book. I will be telling some...
Listen on: Apple Podcasts Spotify
The essence of historical fiction is telling stories set in a particular period of time. They transport us to a different place, offering insights into the past while exploring themes that are relatable across generations.
In the craft of historical fiction, authors take creative liberties with places, events, and characters, using them as foundations for their stories. Here are some noteworthy examples: "Gone with the Wind" by Margaret Mitchell, "War and Peace" by Leo Tolstoy, "The Pillars of the Earth" by Ken Follett, and “The Great Gatsby”... Fitzgerald. Among such works most discussed of course is Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s “One Hundred Years Of Solitude.”
One of the few Indian writers who have attempted a huge span of time in a novel is my guest today, Tejaswini Apte-Rahm. Her debut novel, "The Secret of More," unfolds in colonial Bombay and spans 50 years—1899 to 1952. (Another such notable work is David Davidar’s “The House Of Blue Mangoes”—featured in my conversation with him in an earlier episode on this podcast: https://litcity.in/e41-sptfy.)
Tejaswini’s story captures the transformation of Bombay, under British rule, from a mercantile centre to a busy metropolis. And the emergence of a vibrant movie industry—starting with silent movies.
And against this intriguing backdrop, she unravels the story of a young man named Tatya, who is driven by a relentless desire for “more” success. Tatya is modelled after Tejaswini’s great-grandfather—and she crafted his character and that of early Bombay through extensive research, including the oral histories of her family.
It's easy to understand why "The Secret Of More" has captured the attention of critics like myself and many others. There's something truly compelling about this novel that draws you in and keeps you there. Managing to maintain a charged narrative across five decades is not easy, but Tejaswini does it well. Deservedly, the book just won the Tata Literature Live First Book Award For Fiction 2023, and at the time of this recording, it's shortlisted for both the JCB and the Atta Galatta awards. The JCB award winner is to be announced around the time this episode goes live.
I invited her on this podcast to get a look at her creative process. So she now joins me here.
ABOUT TEJASWINI APTE-RAHMTejaswini Apte-Rahm's short story collection, These Circuses That Sweep Through the Landscape, was shortlisted for two awards in 2017. She co-authored an environmental education book for children, The Poop Book!, nominated for the Jarul Book Award 2021-22 and translated into Tibetan. Her fiction has appeared in various publications. She has worked as a journalist and environmental researcher. She studied in Singapore and the UK, and has lived in Serbia, Israel, Cambodia, Thailand, Myanmar, Bangladesh, Fiji and Azerbaijan. She currently lives in Germany.
BUY THE SECRET OF MORE: https://amzn.to/40LDTBn
WHAT'S THAT WORD?!
Co-host Pranati "Pea" Madhav joins Ramjee Chandran in the fun etymology segment, "WHAT'S THAT WORD?!"
CONTACT US
Reach us by mail: theliterarycity@explocity.com or simply, tlc@explocity.com
Or here: https://www.facebook.com/groups/thelite
The Story Chaser
This is a journey along the way of writing my first book. I will be telling some...
Listen on: Apple Podcasts Spotify
My guest today is the remarkable Mani Shankar Aiyar. If you haven’t heard of him, let’s simply admit that you’ve been living under a rock.
If you've been anywhere near the worlds of diplomacy, politics, or literature, you will know of him in detail but let me sum up his remarkable journey as succinctly as I can.
Mani Shankar Aiyar joined the Indian Foreign Service in 1963. He then went on to become the Consul General in Karachi, Pakistan in 1978 through 1982. His path took a significant turn when he entered the Prime Minister's Office in 1985, working closely with the late Prime Minister, Rajiv Gandhi.
However, in 1989, he made a pivotal decision to leave the diplomatic arena and dive headfirst into politics. He served off and on as a Member of Parliament for the Congress Party for 25 years.
Aiyar is a diplomat and politician—a man of words with a deep well of knowledge and a vast literary appetite. His unfiltered and honest expression, which has sometimes landed him in hot water, causing his own party, the Congress Party, to distance themselves from his candid remarks.
His sense of humour is decidedly wicked and Wodehousian and he is nothing if not completely hilarious on demand. In one interview he spoke of his early Marxist leanings and being investigated by Indian intelligence for it. Of this, he said, “I think the Intelligence Bureau ultimately came to the conclusion that I was indeed a Marxist but of the Groucho variety.”
For all his education a career in the best places in administration, Aiyar remains a socialist. He believes that the real and equitable development of India can happen only ground up, from the villages. To this, the country created the Ministry Of Panchayati Raj… for him. He was its first minister.
His book, "Memoirs Of A Maverick," is a delightful read. It’s the sort of book that you can read in one sitting. And today, I am truly honored to host him again, this time on my podcast. He joins me from his home in Delhi, diplomat, politician, columnist, author, Mani Shankar Aiyar.
ABOUT MANI SHANKAR AIYARAfter Doon School and St Stephen’s College, he joined the Indian Foreign Service and served for 26 years. In 1985, Rajiv Gandhi inducted him into the Prime Minister's Office from where he migrated four years later into politics and Parliament.
Buy MEMOIRS OF A MAVERICK: https://amzn.to/3FJfsuy
WHAT'S THAT WORD?!
Co-host Pranati "Pea" Madhav joins Ramjee Chandran in "WHAT'S THAT WORD?!", where they discuss the phrase "RAINING CATS AND DOGS*,
CONTACT USReach us by mail: theliterarycity@explocity.com or simply, tlc@explocity.com
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The Story Chaser
This is a journey along the way of writing my first book. I will be telling some...
Listen on: Apple Podcasts Spotify
In an essay, published in a 1964 edition of The Times Literary Supplement, V S Naipaul wrote:
"The language was ours, to use as we pleased. The literature that came with it was therefore of peculiar authority, but this literature was like an alien mythology. There was, for instance, Wordsworth’s notorious poem about the daffodil. A pretty little flower, no doubt; but we had never seen it. Could the poem have any meaning for us?"
He was talking about the irrelevance of English language education that was bottled in the UK and served up to the colonies. He was speaking of the sensibilities that post-colonial writers must have felt when confronted with the British literary canon as their window to a worldview.
He eloquently expressed the perplexity felt by post-colonial writers when confronted with the British literary canon, which had been transplanted to their educational systems. Naipaul's words not only encapsulated the sentiment of those writers but also laid the foundation for the genre known as post-colonial literature.
He, along with his contemporaries, emerged as the pioneering voice of post-colonial literature, paving the way for subsequent generations. Yet, even now, the weight of the British canon lingers as a defining aspect of their literary heritage.
Today, we have the privilege of introducing you to Ivy Ngeow, a remarkable Malaysian author. She embodies the spirit of this literary fusion, skillfully weaving mystery narratives with a diverse tapestry of multicultural voices. Her latest work, "The American Boyfriend," stands as a testament to her storytelling prowess. This novel traverses the landscapes of the UK and the vibrant backdrop of Florida, offering an authentic and insightful narrative that mirrors the complexities of contemporary life.
Join us as we explore the enduring influence of the British canon on post-colonial literature and delve into the remarkable literary journey of Ivy Ngeow, our first Malaysian author on The Literary City.
ABOUT IVY NGEOWIvy Ngeow was born and raised in Malaysia. She holds an MA in Writing from Middlesex University, where she won the 2005 Middlesex University Literary Press Prize. Her debut, Cry of the Flying Rhino (2017), was awarded the International Proverse Prize in Hong Kong. Her novels include Heart of Glass (2018), Overboard (2020) and White Crane Strikes (2022). She is the commissioning editor of the Asian Anthology New Writing series. The American Boyfriend was longlisted for the Avon x Mushers Entertainment Prize. She lives in London.
Buy THE AMERICAN BOYFRIEND: https://amzn.to/3QBJiaZ
WHAT'S THAT WORD?!
Co-host Pranati "Pea" Madhav joins Ramjee Chandran in "WHAT'S THAT WORD?!", where they discuss the phrase "WATCHING THE PAINT DRY*
CONTACT USReach us by mail: theliterarycity@explocity.com or simply, tlc@explocity.com
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Background music by Geoff Harvey, Pixabay and Andy Warner,Tunetank
The Story Chaser
This is a journey along the way of writing my first book. I will be telling some...
Listen on: Apple Podcasts Spotify
Most of us do not colour code our threat levels. But nations do.
Following 9/11, the Homeland Security Advisory System in America in 2002 came up with the warning system that we all know and love today in our TV shows—green, blue, yellow, orange and red, depending, obviously, on the severity of the threat.
Government officials plan and practice their responses to each threat level—war games for the bureaucrats.
What if the threat was not a threat in the conventional sense of some action that the nation must defend, but the threat that comes from nothing at all? One example is say, the leader of the nation passes and the administration suddenly loses its alpha and is left rudderless and the panjandrums receive no instructions on what to do next.
Building an entire novel built upon this possibility as a foundational premise, is my guest today, a journalist, author, analyst, and commentator, and now, novelist. Aakar Patel, known for his extensive body of work in politics, culture, and political economics, has ventured into the world of fiction with his debut novel—After Messiah.
A novel is a remarkable canvas for expressing ideas, freeing the author from the constraints of traditional media like newspapers.
Newspapers, for instance, are required to simply and clearly report what happened. But sometimes as a newsperson, you get to know about things that you cannot report by the usual rules of reportage. Such as off-the-record information that might be of great importance. The edit page of the newspaper is for such things— where you might reveal or hint at something, having editorialised it.
Aakar Patel's work raises essential questions about the role of the bureaucracy and the responsibilities it bears. His superior skills in prose ensure that his novel is not just thought-provoking but also an effortless—and very often funny—read. Aakar is not one to stay snugly inside the box; he busts out the whole “eager to learn and illuminate” ethic and thus, escapes the confines of convention.
Today, he unveils this debut novel. While After Messiah might be his debut novel, this is not his debut appearance on The Literary City. He is my first returning guest in almost two years of this show. He joins me from his home in Bangalore, a city we share.
PREVIOUS APPEARANCE: https://litcity.in/e14-sptfy
ABOUT AAKAR PATEL
He is a syndicated columnist who has edited English and Gujarati newspapers. His books include "Why I Write", "Our Hindu Rashtra: What It Is. How We Got Here", "Price of the Modi Years" and "The Anarchist Cookbook". His work reimagining South Asia, "The Case For Akhand Bharat" is out in 2024. He is the Chair of Amnesty International India.
BUY AFTER MESSIAH: https://amzn.to/3Q4Xj0q
WHAT'S THAT WORD?!Co-host Pranati "Pea" Madhav joins Ramjee Chandran in "WHAT'S THAT WORD?!", where they discuss the word "MESSIAH"
CONTACT USReach us by mail: theliterarycity@explocity.com or simply, tlc@explocity.com
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The Story Chaser
This is a journey along the way of writing my first book. I will be telling some...
Listen on: Apple Podcasts Spotify
Good literature can help us navigate our own emotions and motivations, and it helps us see the world through the eyes of the writer. The best literature touches our hearts and our minds. It triggers our emotions, and makes us think critically about the world around us, by challenging our assumptions and consequently, expanding our understanding of what it means to be human.
Some writers write from the heart, some from the head. The truly literary among them speak from the junction of emotion and reason—and this is what makes literature powerful. It is what allows us to connect with characters and stories on a deeper level.
My guest today is an example of a writer who can write from the heart and from the head. She is novelist Anjum Hasan.
Anjum grew up in small town India, in Shillong, Meghalaya—as we imagine, an idyllic setting in which her early impressions of life and culture took root, she now lives in the urban sprawl of modern Bangalore.
And—judging from her earlier novels—she is comfortable in both skins. Anjum’s ability to traverse the two landscapes—both of small-town India and the ambition of Bangalore—is seamless. And this could be one reason why her insight is not just quick and keen, but unusual.
And this sense of the insight has led to some pretty evocative, well-crafted prose. A good example of this is her latest novel, History's Angel—a powerful and moving story about lives in a time of rising religious phobia. History’s Angel explores the protagonist Alif's challenges of navigating an increasingly incomprehensible contemporary India, where political unrest is the normal and nostalgia is the refuge. The story offers a perspective on the larger context of asserting humanity in the face of widening social fissures.
Anjum Hasan, apart from her novels, is someone I have always admired in general, for her prose. Her writing is sharp, compassionate, and darkly witty. What gets me most is her ability to craft sentences that are elegant but also accessible. I have always wanted to ask her about her prose. So she is joining me from her family home in lovely Shillong.
ABOUT ANJUM HASAN
Anjum Hasan’s work has been shortlisted for the Sahitya Akademi Award, the Hindu Literary Prize, and the Crossword Fiction Award. She won the Valley of Words Fiction Award 2019. She has been a Homi Bhabha Fellow, a Charles Wallace Writer-in-Residence, and is currently a New India Foundation Fellow. Her essays, short stories and poems are widely published including in New York Review of Books, Granta, The Paris Review, Baffler, Los Angeles Review of Books, Wasafiri, Asia Literary Review, and Caravan. She is the co-editor of the recent anthology Future Library: Contemporary Indian Writing.
BUY HISTORY’S ANGEL: https://amzn.to/3tcUFwr
WHAT'S THAT WORD?!
Co-host Pranati "Pea" Madhav joins Ramjee Chandran in "WHAT'S THAT WORD?!", where they discuss the word "ALEF”
CONTACT US
Reach us by mail: theliterarycity@explocity.com or simply, tlc@explocity.comOr here: https://www.facebook.com/groups/theliterarycityOr here: https://www.instagram.com/explocityblr/
Cover pic credit: Lekha Naidu.
The Story Chaser
This is a journey along the way of writing my first book. I will be telling some...
Listen on: Apple Podcasts Spotify
As a curious and casual reader of linguistics, one of the first things I learned is that there is no monolithic object called a single language. Languages are like a living organism, they grow and sometimes they are said to die, and sometimes, like humans, they disappear into a bureaucracy.
Age and origins of language are not straightforward because languages evolve gradually over time, their origins, often, shrouded in prehistory. So, to determine that a particular language is “pure” or that another one is the world’s oldest language is to make specious determination. And naturally everything specious leads to contention. And then, the idea of linguistic age can vary, depending on how one defines it—whether by the emergence of a common ancestor language, or by early written records, or other criteria. And so it goes. And although one’s language is the closest expression of one’s identity, the more we learn the more we will temper our assumptions with a generous measure of “I don’t know.”
This is exceptionally true of India. There is possibly no other landmass that offers up an overgrowth of languages, dialects and linguistic surprises as India does. All Indians know we have a diverse language landscape. Very few of us understand how astonishingly diverse.
My guest today is the remarkable Prof Ganesh Devy—one of India’s foremost intellectuals, a linguist, a literary critic, and a cultural activist renowned for his pioneering work in documenting endangered languages and championing linguistic and cultural diversity in India. He is the principal behind the mammoth People's Linguistic Survey of India—or PLSI—and the winner of national awards, including the Sahitya Akademi Award and the Padma Shri.
Prof. Devy's passion for language extends to his deep concern about the pitfalls of turning language into a political weapon. His idea of political activism is quite real—he lives it. His extensive travel and the time he spent living among tribal communities is a testament to his commitment as would his returning the Sahitya Akademi award in protest after the tragic killing of MM Kalburgi.
His most recent work is the book The Indians—Histories Of A Civilisation. A dazzling project that maps the history and evolution of the peoples of India. Written by over 100 scholars—and edited by Profs GN Devy & Ravi Korisettar and Tony Joseph—it maps every region of the country and speaks of the Indian human heritage of 12,000 years from the Ice Age to the present. And this book distills it into a little less than 700 pages, making it accessible for everyone, even with the most modest curiosity.
You probably have heard of Prof Ganesh Devy but if you have not, it is a very good idea to learn more about someone who has pretty much made it his life mission to unearth, protect and foster the plurality that makes India, India.
ABOUT PROFESSOR GANESH DEVY
He led the People’s Linguistic Survey of India (PLSI), a comprehensive documentation of all living Indian languages. He has received several awards including the Padma Shri, Prince Claus Award, and Linguapax Award.
Buy The Indians: Histories of a Civilization: https://amzn.to/3ZfoE2I
WHAT'S THAT WORD?!
Co-host Pranati "Pea" Madhav joins Ramjee Chandran in "WHAT'S THAT WORD?!", where they discuss the words "MOB" and “CROWD”
CONTACT USReach us by mail: theliterarycity@explocity.com or simply, tlc@explocity.com
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As part of Siddhartha’s awakening, he became aware of a spiritual energy in nature where trees had souls, birds had wisdom, and flowers bloomed no matter what the season. And snakes had the power of protection. And then there was all manner of mythical and hybrid creature contributing to the magical art and literature of Buddhism.
Of the many symbols and icons of Buddhism, there are two that are easily identifiable—the tree, everyone knows the most remembered thing is that the Buddha came to his enlightenment under one—the Bodhi tree—and another is the snake.
Snake cults have always been known to India as I guess there was always the danger of snakebites—still an issue today in most parts of India. But the snake features in the narrative of the Buddha’s life. In one famous story, a cobra coiled itself around the base of Buddha’s platform of the tree and then spread its hood over his head, to protect him from the elements as he reached his enlightenment. And even since, understandably, the snake has been used as the principal symbol of protection.
Happening right now, in New York City, as we speak is an exhibition called “Tree And Serpent” at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. It explores the origins of Buddhist art in India. The exhibition features more than 140 objects dating from 200 BC to 400 AD including sculptures, paintings, jewellery, and metalwork. It also explores the influences on early Buddhist art by other cultures, such as the Hellenistic world and the Roman Empire. The most significant slice of it is that this exhibition focuses on the contribution of South India to the Buddhist canon. Historically, the contribution of south India was often overlooked or downplayed and Tree And Serpent seeks to correct this gap in the narrative.
Tree And Serpent—not sure if I should call it a companion book—is the first book to focus on Buddhist art produced in South India from 200 BCE to 400 CE. While traditional narratives tend to focus on north India, this book presents Buddhist art from monastic sites in the south.
My guest today is John Guy. He is the author of Tree And Serpent and he is Florence and Herbert Irving curator of South and South Asian Art at the Met in New York. His scholarly association with Indian art spans a lifetime of work and I am deeply honoured to be able to speak with him today.
What I find amazing is what he had to go through to put this exhibition together. From ferreting out these Buddhist relics in remote parts of Andhra and other locations to shipping them to New York, the process would have been consuming. Amplify that when you consider that some of the heaviest pieces had to be transported, before the monsoons set in, by a boat, a ferry across the Krishna river and then on land to be loaded onto planes at Hyderabad.
Let’s ask him all about it. He joins me from his office in New York City.
ABOUT JOHN GUY
John Guy's research interests focus on the early Buddhist art of India and the temple arts of the Hindu-Buddhist-Jain traditions. He is an elected Fellow of the London Society of Antiquaries and of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Buy Tree & Serpent: Early Buddhist Art in India: https://amzn.to/3PbDzaS. Head to your favourite bookstore for a deal.
The Exhibition: https://www.metmuseum.org/exhibitions/tree-and-serpent
WHAT'S THAT WORD?!
Co-host Pranati "Pea" Madhav joins Ramjee Chandran in "WHAT'S THAT WORD?!", where they discuss the word "MONIKER".
CONTACT USReach us by mail: theliterarycity@explocity.com or simply, tlc@explocity.com
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Or here: h
Today I‘m excited to be speaking with Ahmed Naji, a writer who spent two years in prison in Egypt for writing what the authorities judged to be objectionable material.
But while Ahmed Naji was in prison, he discovered literature and through that, himself. It’s an amazing story of a person who finds magic and hope in the unlikely environs of the library of a stereotypical prison—a pestilential and dank hovel, one biscuit short of hell.
But before I talk to him, I thought it might be useful to get some context going here, so, a little bit, about Egyptian literature first. Modern Egyptian literature began to flourish in the early 20th century, or right up to say the 1940s, as writers started to break away from traditional Arabic literary forms such as classical Arabic poetry, with specific meters and rhyming schemes. It was during that time that author Taha Hussein, often called the "Dean of Arabic Literature," challenged classical literary norms, when he introduced a more accessible style of prose.
The next decade saw the birth of a cultural renaissance with the overthrow of the monarchy in 1952 and the beginning of the republic. That’s about when Naguib Mahfouz happened. He went on to win the Nobel in 1988 and brought world attention to Egyptian literature.
As with all cultural forms, one decade tends to build on the previous and the successive decades have seen social realism, pioneering books, like "Woman at Point Zero", about the struggles of women in Egyptian society, and writers explained the challenges of contemporary life. There was the growth of female and feminist voices and of course the influences from the Arab Spring. Importantly, there has been a growth in contribution to literature from the Egyptian diaspora.
I found Ahmed Naji’s writing online and I was fascinated by his story and his work and we tracked him down to his new home in the United States. Ahmed’s latest book Rotten Evidence is a story about his time in prison, about how he discovered literature and found the writer in himself and the reality of protest. These lines capture the essence of the protest against censorship and being jailed for alleged obscenity.
"James Joyce, who swore to express himself with the greatest degree of freedom possible—and never to serve home, fatherland, or church—said a writer had three weapons: silence, exile, and cunning. Well, Joyce, they put me in prison, and all I had left was laughter and rage."
Such is the captivating prose of my guest today. Ahmed Naji joins me from his home in Las Vegas for this delightful conversation.
ABOUT AHMED NAJI
Ahmed Naji is a writer, journalist, documentary filmmaker... and criminal. His novel Using Life made him the only writer in Egyptian history to have been sent to prison for offending public morality. Naji has won several prizes including a Dubai Press Club Award and a PEN/Barbey Freedom to Write Award. He is currently a fellow at the Beverly Rogers, Carol C. Harter Black Mountain Institute.
Buy Rotten Evidence: Reading and Writing in an Egyptian Prison: https://litcity.in/rotten-evidence
WHAT'S THAT WORD?!
Co-host Pranati "Pea" Madhav joins Ramjee Chandran in "WHAT'S THAT WORD?!", where they discuss the Arabic proverb "BUKRA FI'L MISH MISH".
CONTACT USReach us by mail: theliterarycity@explocity.com or simply, tlc@explocity.com
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Why were the 1980s pivotal in so many respects? Think the giddy days of glasnost and perestroika, the end of the cold war—of the whole Soviet Union in fact, liberalisation and globalisation, GATT and open borders, the assassination of Indira Gandhi, the rise of Rajiv Gandhi—who stepped on the gas and pushed the country towards a more open economy.
I became a lobbyist in Delhi in the 80s. I was barely twenty when I joined as a fresher, in 1980. When I quit my job and returned home to Bangalore in 1988, I had aged more than the chronology of the eight years would suggest.
As a young man growing into his own, I was privileged to have been in the middle of the most pivotal period of Indian administration and world history since WWII. Up close and in the middle of it all. It was a lesson in how policy and administration works, it was a lesson in understanding the scale of their enterprise, and it was a lesson in humility.
When you are in your twenties, you have the answer to all problems—and there’s a good side to that because you feel both empowered and a participant, with access to the centres of power.
But my guest today was one of those who was, himself a centre of power—Chinmay Gharekhan. Of the many important offices he held, one of which was in the Prime Minister’s Office—both during the time of Indira Gandhi and then Rajiv Gandhi. And then he was India’s Permanent Representative to the United Nations.
His book is a memoir of his days at the Prime Minister’s Office, the real seat of power in India and following that in the United Nations Security Council during the period of the First Gulf War—another greatly pivotal period for us.
Chinmay Gharekhan is the author of the memoir, Centres Of Power - My Years In The Prime Minister’s Office and Security Council. It is always fascinating to think of our history—as these things influence the way we think today—and when you have someone who had a ringside seat to those events, you listen carefully.
And joining me from his home in Scarsdale in New York is Ambassador Gharekhan.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Chinmaya R. Gharekhan, a distinguished member of the Indian Foreign Service, served in several capitals in different continents. He had the unique privilege of working with two prime ministers, Indira Gandhi and Rajiv Gandhi, for a period of about five years. He spent the better part of his career dealing with the United Nations. As ambassador of India to the United Nations in New York, he represented India on the Security Council during 1991–1992 and was twice president of the Security Council. He was appointed prime minister’s special envoy for West Asia and the Middle East Peace Process during 2005–2009.
Buy Centres Of Power: https://amzn.to/3DmnM2u
WHAT'S THAT WORD?!
Co-host Pranati "Pea" Madhav joins Ramjee Chandran in "WHAT'S THAT WORD?!", where they discuss the etymology of "HOIST WITH ONE'S OWN PETARD"
CONTACT USReach us by mail: theliterarycity@explocity.com or simply, tlc@explocity.com
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A few weeks ago, I was reading LitHub, one of the many literary magazines I enjoy greatly, and I found an essay that caught my immediate fancy. It is titled, “Literature in the Bardo: Tenzin Dickie on the Past, Present, and Future of the Tibetan Essay”.
Not only was I captivated by her prose but importantly, it opened a window to the world of Tibetan literature.
Growing up in India, Tibet exists by default, if nothing else. We know a smattering of things about that country and its culture. There’s the Dalai Lama, there are the Tibetan settlements in Dharamsala in the north and Bylakuppe, south of Bangalore and we know that the Tibetans come here to run away from the Chinese occupation of their country. Inevitably there’s someone who tells us to go to that Tibetan doctor—and that their system of medicine is the best.
Things like this make us believe we know Tibet more than we really do. Gives us a sense of familiarity but not any knowledge. You don’t think much about it—other than maybe feeling happy to have been a shelter for someone in need, especially when that someone is the Dalai Lama—but the LitHub piece set me running down a delightful rabbit hole.
My guest today is the author of that essay, Tenzin Dickie and you heard her reading an extract from it. I would describe Tenzin as an exceptionally gifted writer. Her latest book is titled The Penguin Book Of Modern Tibetan Essays and the stories in it present a wonderful window into the Tibetan soul—these stories are both touching and strong and you begin to appreciate not just the mind of the minority but also the mind of a minority in exile, possibly forever.
Tenzin edited this book and with this and whatever I read about her in my research, I’ll venture that she is the new custodian of the Tibetan tale.
I have spent the last week happily immersed in Tibetan literature and I have a ton of questions for her. And so here she is, joining me from her home in Boston.
ABOUT TENZIN DICKIETenzin Dickie is the editor of the English language anthologies of modern Tibetan fiction and nonfiction: Old Demons, New Deities: Twenty One Short Stories from Tibet & The Penguin Book of Modern Tibetan Essays. A graduate of Harvard and Columbia Universities, she also studied at the Tibetan Children's Village School in Dharamsala, India.
Buy The Penguin Book Of Modern Tibetan Essays here: https://amzn.to/3NVcEOW
WHAT'S THAT WORD?!
Co-host Pranati "Pea" Madhav joins Ramjee Chandran in "What's That Word?!", where they discuss the etymology of "PROVERB"
CONTACT USReach us by mail: theliterarycity@explocity.com or simply, tlc@explocity.com
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This is the incredible but true story of an Englishman—a dockworker in Bombay in the 1940s, who became a smuggler around the time of Independence.
Not far offshore from the Ferry Wharf in Mumbai is a small island. It’s only some 100 metres out by boat, and you can see it from Ferry Wharf. It’s called Cross Island. You can see Cross Island on Google Maps. But even people who have lived in Mumbai all their lives are not aware that this island even exists.
Mystery has always shrouded Cross Island. And like every abandoned or uninhabited place, it is beset by urban legend. The usual stuff… it’s haunted… it has ghosts… but the most compelling mystery of Cross Island is the story of the gold supposedly buried there.
My guest today, Godfrey Pereria reads a passage about the gold that was buried on Cross Island because of the doings of the famous Portuguese poet Luis de Camoes. And about how the ship captain who actually hid the gold on the island was killed in a fight and how, since then, no one has been able to find the gold.
Godfrey Pereira is the author of the book, Four And Twenty Blackbirds. He chanced upon the story of an Englishman, Charlie Strongbow,—an Englishman, born and raised in Bombay and a dockworker in the Bombay docks.
Charlie Strongbow was one of a few Englishmen who were in India at the time of Independence, but did not leave India. Returning to England was not an option for them as they had nothing there. He and 23 others—hence four and twenty—British people move to Cross Island to set up a smuggling operation.
We have all read colonial and independence and partition stories all of which tend to be about people at the top of society or who are responsible for historical events. But Godfrey Pereira’s historical fiction novel highlights another point of view. It focuses on this group of Britishers of lowly status—men of calloused hands and base desires—trying to survive independence. It's a new perspective on the colonial era.
And of course, there’s always gold. There’s no evidence that the poet Luis de Camoes decamped with stolen gold, but the damnedest thing is that in 2021—just two years ago—workers dredging in Cross Island found two bars of gold stuck in their dredging equipment.
Was this the gold that de Camoes had decamped with? Or was it all urban legend Godfrey Pereira joins me from his home in West Palm Beach, Florida so we can ask him.
ABOUT GODFREY PEREIRA
Born in Pali Village, Bandra, Bombay, Godfrey Joseph Pereira graduated from college with a degree in English Literature and Philosophy. What followed was a career in journalism. He worked with leading national magazines and worked as War Correspondent covering the First Gulf War from Israel. His first novel Bloodline Bandra was published by HarperCollins in 2014. His second novel is Four And Twenty Blackbirds, a work of historical fiction. He has just finished his third novel The Incredible India Brownwash. He has lived and worked as a journalist in Bombay, New York City and New Jersey and now works and resides in West Palm Beach, Florida.
Buy Four And Twenty Blackbirds here: https://amzn.to/3PGCkRL
WHAT'S THAT WORD?!
Co-host Pranati "Pea" Madhav joins Ramjee Chandran in "What's That Word?!", where they discuss the meaning and origins of "Let the chips fall where they may".
WANT TO BE ON THE SHOW?Reach us by mail: theliterarycity@explocity.com or simply, tlc@explocity.com.
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When George Whitman, in 1951, established a bookstore he wanted it to be more than a literary sanctuary for book lovers. He turned it into a sanctuary for writers seeking inspiration.
The bookshop — as any devotee of books or, really, any of my listeners would have guessed — is the legendary Shakespeare & Company in the heart of Paris. Whitman welcomed all writers who needed a place to stay as his own personal guests at the bookstore — and to accommodate them, he had rooms and beds and made space available, entirely free. This philosophy is best summarised by a sign painted above an inner door that reads, “Be kind to strangers lest they be angels in disguise”.
In exchange for staying there for free, these indigent writers — Whitman called them tumbleweeds — were asked only to read one book every day, and help stack books and carry out other chores in the shop. Oh, and they had to write something autobiographical about themselves for Whitman’s archives. Today, Shakespeare & Company is said to have played host and refuge to an estimated 40,000 tumbleweeds since 1951.
One such tumbleweed that blew through Shakespeare & Company was my guest today, Jeremy Mercer — author of a delightful book, Books, Baguettes & Bedbugs. The book has another — and in my opinion better — title, Time Was Soft There.
Towards the end of 1999, Jeremy had to abandon his life — and his job as a crime reporter in Ottawa, Canada — following a death threat. You’ll find out why in this podcast. He sought refuge in Paris. Before long, Jeremy was broke and without a place to stay, ended up living in Shakespeare and Company, as another tumbleweed.
During his time there, Jeremy met a vibrant cast of characters — including George Whitman and fellow tumbleweeds — all of whom made the bookstore their home. Jeremy’s daily life became inseparable from the bookstore's activities, and its rich history and its literary heritage.
Again, most of my listeners would already know that Shakespeare & Company — first started by Sylvia Beach was frequented by Ernest Hemingway, Scott Fitzgerald, James Joyce, and other literary giants. In fact, Sylvia Beach first published James Joyce’s Ulysses, when no one else would. In Whitman’s time, Shakespeare & Company served as a base for many of the writers of the Beat Generation, such as Allen Ginsberg, Gregory Corso, and William S. Burroughs.
Jeremy’s book gives us a sense of the bohemian world of artists and writers in Paris as it celebrates the charm of independent bookstores. Above all, Jeremy brings us close to George Whitman, the legend.
ABOUT JEREMY MERCER
Jeremy Mercer is a Canadian writer and translator who lives in the Luberon in France. He has written four works of non-fiction that have been published in more than a dozen languages. After translating the English edition of L’Abolition by former French Minister of Justice Robert Badinter, he began specialising in art and photography translation. His writing has won or been nominated for numerous literary and journalism prizes. He also serves as president of AS Dauphin, his local football club.
Buy Books, Baguettes & Bedbugs here: https://amzn.to/3CwWC8C
WHAT'S THAT WORD?!
Co-host Pranati "Pea" Madhav joins Ramjee Chandran in "What's That Word?!", where they discuss the meaning and origins of "left bank" and "right bank".
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Authors have for a long time used literary expressions of anguish as a powerful tool to connect with readers. They may use language and symbolic references to nuance the emotions associated with it, but whatever their approach, they look to inspire emotions that deliver that gut punch.
My guest today, Aamina Ahmad clearly knows how to handle the literature of conflicted emotions. Her debut novel, The Return Of Faraz Ali—set in the walled city of Lahore, Pakistan—is the story of a cop who is asked to hush up the murder of a prostitute by some powerful figures. But his deep connection to the Mohullah from his past takes the story in a direction that is both unexpected and compelling.
While “The Return Of Faraz Ali” might be Aamina’s debut novel, she is an experienced writer. Her background and career speak to this experience.
Aamina was born and raised in London and studied English in college. She worked for the BBC as a script editor, including on epic stories like The East Enders. And since then she has, of note, published a full length play, a short story and a novel. Here’s how she did:
Her play, titled The Dishonoured, won a Screencraft Stage Play Award and was nominated for an Off-West End Award. Her short story "The Red One Who Rocks," published in 2019, won the Pushcart Prize. And “The Return Of Faraz Ali” won the Writers’ Guild of Great Britain Award. And then they decided to give her the 2017 Rona Jaffe Foundation Writer’s Award for… well, simply for being a good and promising writer.
One of the many things I like about doing this show is discovering new authors—even if the rest of the world discovered them before I did.
And ever so often, a particularly delightful piece of writing presents itself and I spend several happy days disappearing into the worlds that they have crafted. The last few days were spent in the literature of Aamina.
And now, she joins me from her home in Minneapolis. Aamina Ahmad, welcome to The Literary City.
ABOUT AAMINA AHMAD
Aamina Ahmad was born and raised in London, where she worked for BBC Drama and other independent television companies as a script editor. Her play The Dishonoured was produced by Kali Theatre Company, in 2016. She has an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and is a recipient of the Stegner Fellowship from Stanford University, a Pushcart Prize, and a Rona Jaffe Writers’ Award. Her short fiction has appeared in journals including One Story, The Southern Review and Ecotone. She won the Writers’ Guild Award 2022 for Best First Novel and the Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction at the L.A Book Prize for The Return of Faraz Ali. She lives in Minneapolis, Minnesota.
Buy The Return Of Faraz Ali: https://amzn.to/3nBWrVH
WHAT'S THAT WORD?!
Co-host Pranati "Pea" Madhav joins Ramjee Chandran in "What's That Word?!", where they discuss the origin of the phrase, "IT'S ALL GREEK TO ME!".
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There are many who believe that the cradle of democracy was Greece. But if anything, Greece may lay claim to the etymology of the word democracy, but not to democracy itself. Whence then?
The short answer by many historians is that the first evidence of democracy was in the Syrian-Mesopotamian region (Mesopotamia would be a large region around Iran as we know it today). That was around 2500 BC and this democracy was characterised by assemblies of people. And then—about 1000 years later—around 1500 BC the Indian sub-continent saw people assembling for public governance.
And in the thousands of years since, we have seen the growth of democracy—marked by greater inclusiveness of its stakeholders. To see all of it laid out in a convenient timeline is both fascinating and illuminating because it provides a ready reference and immediate context.
My guest today is John Keane historian and Professor of Politics, at the University of Sydney. John Keane is credited with introducing and popularising the term "Monitory Democracy" in his book "The Life and Death of Democracy," published in 2009. His formulation of "Monitory Democracy" has gained widespread recognition and influence in the field of political theory, as a distinct and important form of democratic governance.
John’s latest book, The Shortest History Of Democracy, is a concise journey through the history of democracy, from ancient Greece to the present day. It sets out the origins you really need to know about democracy. To be able to pull this off in less than only 250 pages, would take a lifetime of learning.
John Keane’s contributions to the field of political science have been both profound and influential. His research has focused on a wide range of topics, from democratisation and globalisation to political violence and the role of media in politics.
But it all begs the question that very few can answer and I am not one of them: what is democracy? I grew up completely convinced that my government if you like is the moral equivalent of an apartment building manager, to whom I would offer this job description: “Keep things clean, safe and in working condition and you don’t get to decide I can and cannot watch on cable TV.”
But in reality, well, the study of democracy and its history is the reality in which we live, an always fluid—even roller-coaster—state of affairs it seems. But the importance of a historian in this mix goes back to that time-worn adage about repeating history.
I can't help but wonder: what went right, what went wrong, and where is democracy headed and this is a question that really visits all of us… even our listeners who don’t live in a democracy.
This is a timeless conversation that I can't wait to have with John. Happily, I don’t have to wait, because here is he joining me from Sydney, Australia.
ABOUT JOHN KEANE
He is a Professor of Politics at the University of Sydney and the WZB (Berlin). Renowned globally for his creative thinking about politics, history, media and democracy, The Times of London described him as among the country’s leading political thinkers The Australian Broadcasting Corporation speaks of him as one of Australia’s great intellectual exports.
Buy The Shortest History Of Democracy: https://amzn.to/3LlsWAj
WHAT'S THAT WORD?!
Co-host Pranati "Pea" Madhav joins Ramjee Chandran in "What's That Word?!", where they discuss the origin of the phrase, "TO HELL IN A HAND BASKET".
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That was my guest today, the incomparable Shobhaa De.
Shobhaa is one of the most famous writers in India and her reputation has travelled everywhere, but it behooves me to talk about the realpolitik of Shobhaa De’s literature.
Let me tell you why Shobhaa De is so significant to English writing in India. Not only was her great success as an author inspiring, but to my mind, the most significant thing I can say about Shobhaa is that she kicked down the doors for generations of women writers who followed her.
Uniquely, she gave women a voice. At the risk of reduction, I’ll venture that her novels explore the lives and loves of Indian women who embrace their sensuality without apology.
Despite, simply living their lives is often a patriarchy-fostered challenge, her protagonists are never sad victims. They follow their dreams rather than fit into society's expectations. At the fount of their sentience, they will not be marginalised.
I imagine that such a narrative is even possible only because Shobhaa’s prose is an honest prose, without artifice.
And funny. But the lightness she brings to this prose often belies the dark realities that she is addressing. While most literature of this genre tends to be disconsolate… even self-pitying— the humour I speak of, in Shobhaa’s narratives, is a testament to her skill as a writer.
For this reason, I am sure, her writing has been the subject of almost one hundred academic dissertations—of researchers and scholars in universities around the world—studying feminist literature—and I imagine this number is only growing.
Recently, Shobhaa launched her latest book titled “Insatiable”, and it is a memoir filled with anecdotes and personal experiences—told interestingly from the perspective of food. Artfully, Shobhaa De crafts a narrative using food as the conduit for descriptions of events in her life that happened around it.
In literature, eating and not-eating are always symbolic, and food always means something other than mere food. Food is a fun metaphor in literature. Ernest Hemingway used it as did Shobhaa’s favourites, Zelda and Scott Fitzgerald.
And now, here she is, joining me from her home in Bombay to talk about her life and literature.
ABOUT SHOBHAA DE
Shobhaa Dé, voted by Reader's Digest as one of 'India's Most Trusted People' and by Daily News and Analysis as one of the '50 Most Powerful Women in India', is a bestselling author and a popular social commentator. Her works, both fiction and non-fiction, have been featured in comparative literature courses at universities in India and abroad. Her writing has been translated into many languages including Hindi, Marathi, French, German, Hungarian, Italian, Korean, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish and Turkish, among others. Shobhaa lives in Mumbai with her family.
Buy Insatiable: https://amzn.to/3KKJ2mZ
WHAT'S THAT WORD?!
Co-host Pranati "Pea" Madhav joins Ramjee Chandran in "What's That Word?!", where they discuss the origin of the phrase, "SHIT HIT THE FAN".
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Nilanjana Roy is the girl who, as a child, ate books — in fact, she was known to have devoured them whole. This is obviously a reference to her book The Girl Who Ate Books, a paean to writing, writers and other such pursuit.
Nilanjana is, most recently, author of the novel, Black River and she is my guest on The Literary City and we will talk about her fascinating career, from her early love of reading and writing, which led to her becoming a respected voice in the literary world.
One of Nilanjana’s better known works is "The Wildings," a novel that tells the story of a community of cats who must band together to protect their home from a menacing force. But for me, it is the "The Girl Who Ate Books" — a memoir in which she reflects on her lifelong relationship with literature and evidently, the impact it has had on her life.
In addition to being a novelist, Nilanjana has been a journalist — and something that all journalists agree on is that it provides a certain respect for fact and a discipline of prose — and Nilajana's writing reflects this in spades.
She is also a columnist for reputable publications and consequent to her being a literary commentator, she has views on the evolution of literature in India and her book, The Girl Who Ate Books showcases that side of her very well.
I enjoyed Black River mainly because it had a certain lyrical quality and a journalist’s eye for detail, all of which led to a murder mystery that is at once, a social commentary.
So much to talk to her about. Here she is, joining me from her home in New Delhi.
ABOUT NILANJANA ROY
Nilanjana S Roy is a writer, editor, columnist and compulsive reader. Born in Kolkata, she lives in New Delhi, a combination of cities that make her an expert on stray cats, homicides and brooding political dystopias. She is the author of Black River, a novel set in and around Delhi, the award-winning fantasy duology, The Wildings, and a collection of essays, The Girl Who Ate Books. She has edited three anthologies, including Our Freedoms, and writes a column on books for the Financial Times.
Buy Black River: https://amzn.to/40meahC
WHAT'S THAT WORD?!
Co-host Pranati "Pea" Madhav joins Ramjee Chandran in "What's That Word?!", where they discuss the origin of the word, "NICKNAME".
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In the beginning of the episode, you will hear my guest Jeet Thayil read from his book, Names Of The Women — women whose paths crossed with Christ, and who, it is said, stayed by him during the crucifixion. And after.
I have been fortunate to read so many books since I started hosting this podcast. Each book is as wonderful and as compelling as the next. And then a book comes along, like Names Of The Women that holds the craft of writing to a higher standard.
Let me tantalizingly cycle back to that in a minute.
Penguin had sent me a copy of a book compiled and edited by Jeet — The Penguin Book Of Indian Poets — an almost 1000-page thick compendium of Indian poetry. The book was years in the making and I am sure it will be around years for the taking.
But when I had gone over to interview Jeet’s father, the famous journalist and author, TJS George, an earlier guest on this show, Jeet gave me a copy of Names Of The Women. And it gave me the chills in a way that very few books have done before. It is a hauntingly evocative story of the lives of those women.
Despite being less than 200 pages long, Names Of The Women is aching to be a book three times its length. The substance is such. And when you pack all that into 200 pages, it makes it powerful.
Thayil’s writing is a masterclass in narrative storytelling, rich with literary devices that enhance his already compelling craft.
So much for what I think about the book. Let’s talk to Jeet.
ABOUT JEET THAYIL
Jeet Thayil is the author of four novels and five collections of poetry. His essays,
poetry and short fiction have appeared in the New York Review of Books,
Granta, TLS, The London Magazine, The Guardian and The Paris Review,
among other venues. He is the editor of The Penguin Book of Indian Poets.
Buy Names of the Women: https://amzn.to/3kKdFPj
Buy The Penguin Book Of Indian Poets: https://amzn.to/41MT6lV
WHAT'S THAT WORD?!
Co-host Pranati "Pea" Madhav joins Ramjee Chandran in "What's That Word?!", where they discuss the not-so-fun origins of the word, "FUN".
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It is said that you don’t rescue dogs. They rescue you. This saying reflects the connection we can have with our pets. Especially dogs, who are said to have had a relationship with humans for thousands of years.
When we adopt a dog, we think we're giving them a new lease on life, but in reality, they often give us so much more in return. Joy, comfort, companionship and a sense of purpose. They make us better humans. This idea of animals rescuing humans is the central theme in my guest Lynda Rutledge's brilliant novel, West with Giraffes.
The book follows the journey of Woodrow Wilson Nickel, or Woody, a seventeen-year-old boy who drove two giraffes cross-country from New York to the San Diego Zoo. This novel is based on a true story—events that happened in 1938. The two giraffes survive the high seas and braved a storm that almost killed them. Then they needed to be transported to the San Diego Zoo.
As Woody—and this travelling companion, the Old Man, navigate the challenges of the journey, the giraffes become not just his companions, but his teachers, showing him the beauty and grace of the world around him.
What strikes me about West with Giraffes is how it channels the classic American novel style of writing and storytelling. It's a literary gem that will have you feeling like you're living in 1938 America, driving alongside Woody.
The parallels with Harper Lee's To Kill A Mockingbird are impossible to ignore. Both novels explore themes of coming-of-age, social injustice, and the power of empathy, all set against the backdrop of a rapidly changing America.
While modern writing often reflects the times we live in and the technology we use, Lynda Rutledge proves in this novel that she has the ability to carry forward the tradition of great American authors like Harper Lee, John Steinbeck, and Mark Twain. Her writing is just as compelling.
She joins me from her home in Austin, Texas.
ABOUT LYNDA RUTLEDGE
Lynda Rutledge, a lifelong animal lover, has had the joy of petting baby rhinos, snorkeling with endangered turtles, and strolling with a tower of giraffes in her eclectic freelance career writing nonfiction for well-known publications and organizations while winning awards for her fiction. Her debut novel, Faith Bass Darling's Last Garage Sale, won the 2013 Writers League of Texas Book Award for Fiction and was adapted into a major 2019 French film starring Catherine Deneuve. She, her husband, and resident dog, live outside Austin, Texas. For more information, visit www.lyndarutledge.com
Buy West With Giraffes: https://amzn.to/41b9igo
WHAT'S THAT WORD?!
Special guest Linda Persson joins co-host Pranati "Pea" Madhav and host Ramjee Chandran in "What's That Word?!", where they discuss the interesting origins of the phrase, "TWO SHAKES OF A RAT'S TAIL".
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This interview was recorded live at Blossom Book House, Bangalore.
Many years ago I saw a TV commercial that stuck with me. It showed a montage—sepia tinted portraits of older couples, with rather interesting last names:
Alois and Klara Hitler
Beso Jughashvili and Ekaterine Geladze (Josef Stalin’s parents)
Andruta and Marie Ceausescu (parents of Nikolai Ceausescu, the genocidal leader of Romania.)
And a few similar others. And then the punchline “If only these people had heard of Trojan condoms.”This commercial spoke a truth—that families are involved and responsible for the good ones and the monsters alike.
We have heard much of the campaigns and conquests and cruelties of world leaders and we have read stories of incidents that might have influenced their growing years. But history is rather quiet on the roles their mothers played. Yes, what about Mom? How did Mom mess with their heads?
The most definitive record of this truth—that is the family’s role in history—is written by Simon Seabag Montefiore in his book, "The World—A Family History". Simon’s book opens with the discovery of footprints. In 2013, a storm lashed the coast of eastern England in Norfolk at a village called Happisburg and uncovered these footprints. They found out that these footprints were left behind at least 850,000 years ago by a small group of humans and children— and that is the first evidence of a family.
A blurb in Simon’s book says that from the beginning of history through the present, the one thing that humanity has in common is family. The World—A Family History reveals how the family unit has driven history—from the prehistoric homo antecessors of Happisburg to the modern days—the Trump family included.
The book has such a huge span. In about 1300 pages it takes us through recorded history as we know it and in a never done before narrative, presents the history of the world through the families that have caused and created history in every corner of the world.
This book is nothing short of a modern day epic. To those who have not had the pleasure of reading Simon Sebag Montefiore, let me say that his narrative is not only deep but gripping. And don't let the size of the book fool you. It is unputdownable and call me if it doesn’t go faster than binge-watching Game of Thrones with as much guts, gore and sex.
I have been given the honour of bringing to you this prolific and hugely entertaining historian.
ABOUT SIMON SEBAG MONTEFIORE
Montefiore is the internationally bestselling author of prize-winning books that have been published in 48 languages. Catherine the Great & Potemkin, The Court of the Red Tsar, Young Stalin, Jerusalem: The Biography, and The Romanovs: 1613-1918. He is the author of the Moscow Trilogy of novels: Sashenka, Red Sky at Noon and One Night in Winter. He also wrote Written in History: Letters that Changed the World and Voices of History: Speeches that Changed the World.
You can get a special 20% discount at Blossom Book House on Church St in Bangalore. Or you can it order it from them here: The World: A Family History: https://explo.in/3Yy2UxN or better, here: https://explo.in/3XcUP0r.
WHAT'S THAT WORD?!
Co-host Pranati "Pea" Madhav joins Ramjee Chandran in "What's That Word?!", where they discuss the interesting origins of the word, "CONDOM".
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There’s something primal about watching food shows on TV. Or any food show. Even restaurants that have a glass pane through which you can watch the chefs in the kitchen doing their thing. It engages your attention while they ham it up. No that’s not a pun.
The business of someone setting about chopping up ingredients and turning them into masterful creations of art–truly subliminal and soul stirring to watch on the couch, while you eat instant noodles, unmindful of the irony.
I had no better example than when my partner and I had bought the kids in our apartment building a ton of firecrackers for Deepavali. They had great fun on the street. Suddenly, at 8pm, total silence. They were gone. Bags of fireworks lay unattended on the sidewalk, the starter candles drooping.
And where had all these pre-teen children gone? To watch Masterchef on TV.
For many of us, watching cooking shows or reading about food is a form of escapism. It transports us to far-off lands and exotic cuisines, allowing us to experience new flavors and dishes without leaving home.
But there's more to our love of food literature than just the escapism it provides. Food brings people together. Reading about it gives us a sense of connection. Sharing a meal is a fundamental human experience, and reading about food allows us to share in that experience–even vicariously. By reading about the foods of different regions and countries, we gain insights into their customs, cultures and traditions. So much history and indeed, social anthropology there.
On this podcast—after months of dealing with authors who have written about the ravages of war and politics and poetry’s melancholic joy—today I feel as happy as a predictable late light TV talkshow host who is about to cook Christmas turkey with Martha Stewart.
Except that my guest today is closer to Julia Child, the famous author of cookbooks and host of TV and radio shows in the US. You might remember that Meryl Streep played Julia Child in the movie Julie and Julia.
My guest is Karen Anand, one of India’s best known food personalities. Author of some 30 books and host of TV shows since the mid-1980s Karen has brought class to the industry in India. She is widely respected and—to my knowledge—chefs of all persuasions are known to court her opinion and her approval.
Her most recent book is intriguingly titled “Masala Memsahib” and it is a wonderful journey through giving us a window into food across India. Her expertise is honed from years of practice and her prose is that of an imaginative writer. And I am eager to talk to her about the book and about her life. So here she is. Karen Anand, welcome to The Literary City.
ABOUT KAREN ANAND
Karen Anand is widely accepted as one of India’s first food gurus. A prolific author with some 30 books published, she has been a TV host on popular food shows. Karen received the prestigious Food & Spirit Award (Trophée de l’Esprit Alimentaire) for Culture from the French Government. In 2019, she won the French Ambassadors Travel Writers Award.
Buy Masala Memsahib: https://amzn.to/3hkNywB
WHAT'S THAT WORD?!
Co-host Pranati "Pea" Madhav joins Ramjee Chandran in "What's That Word?!", where they discuss the interesting phrase, "CHERCHEZ LA FEMME". Plus they are joined by celebrity chef, Abhijit Saha.
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When the government exempted media from the lockdown, logically, this was to ensure that the media could do its job—which was to bring information and news to the people who were sequestered in their homes.
My guest today did just that. She is Barkha Dutt, one of India’s best known journalists. Barkha decided that she was going to bring information to the people. True to her wont, she did not do this by halves. She stepped out and travelled across the country with a small team of colleagues.
Over about three months, she with her team logged over 30,000 kms—that’s a shade under 19000 miles—travelling over surface in every available transport just to meet people.
Of course a tragedy like this brings out the best and the worst in people and Barkha was witness to all of it. Appropriately, her book is titled Humans Of Covid.
Everywhere she went, she logged the stories of the worst off among us. These stories are deeply human and capture the essence of how we cope when nature turns against us.
The medical fraternity cared for the living. Barkha met people who cared for the dead. People who put their own religions behind them and even temporarily adopted the faith of those who needed to be cremated. They gave the dead the dignity that the pandemic had taken from them.
At one point this journey turned deeply personal for Barkha. She lost her father to COVID. But she soldiered on and the result is this compelling book. A historical account, oral histories of the most disadvantaged; their grief, sometimes their hubris, often their humanity.
As a journalist Barkha has covered some of the biggest stories in the nation. Of the many, she mentions that her eventful career was bookended by the war in Kargil in 1999 and the Covid crisis in 2021.
In what was a staid and almost pedagogic profession—as journalism in India used to be—she was one of the new breed of TV journalists, aggressive with an eye on one prize alone...the story.
I had the privilege to host a live session with Barkha at the recent Bangalore Literature Festival and doubly my privilege now to welcome her as my guest today.
ABOUT BARKHA DUTT
Barkha Dutt is one of India’s foremost broadcast journalists. After two decades with NDTV, she is now the Founder-Editor of Mojo Story, an independent digital media platform. A columnist for The Washington Post, she has received more than fifty national and international awards, including the Padma Shri.
Buy To Hell and Back: Humans of COVID: https://amzn.to/3urdvgH
WHAT'S THAT WORD?!
Co-host Pranati "Pea" Madhav joins Ramjee Chandran in "What's That Word?!", where they discuss the interesting word, "DEADLINE".
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The ability to write well used to be a necessary qualification for high office. Whether prose or poetry, literature was important as a tool of communication.
It all makes sense. The more skilled you are in the medium of instruction, the better the instruction. The highest thinkers of the realms were always great writers. The founding fathers of the USA—such as Benjamin Franklin and John Adams only to name two very good examples. They pursued letters and learning as a necessary part of their ability to create law and to govern effectively. Before them, we have learned of several of the ancient Greeks and Roman senators who were men of letters. And not to forget some famous Chinese emperors who wrote their edicts in verse.
The mandarins and panjandrums of yore morphed into the present day bureaucrat. Of particular relevance to us today, the diplomat.
My guest today is Abhay K. He is the Deputy Director General of the Indian Council For Cultural Relations. He was India’s Ambassador to Madagascar and is a career diplomat. He is what is called a poet-diplomat.
Poet-diplomats are poets who have also served their countries as diplomats. The best known poet-diplomats are perhaps Geoffrey Chaucer and Thomas Wyatt; the category also includes recipients of the Nobel Prize in Literature: Gabriela Mistral, Saint-John Perse, Miguel Asturias, Pablo Neruda, Czesław Miłosz and Octavio Paz.
Abhay K is one of a few contemporary poet-diplomats. In his words, “Diplomacy is generally conducted in short sentences which reveal as much as they hide. Poetry is no different".
Abhay is the author of several tomes of poetry and through those has discovered so many cultures of the world through their poetry. His latest book is titled The Book Of Bihari Literature. This book opened up a world that I had only suspected existed. With every page.
The biggest revelation I got from reading the book was how humane the text and adult the sentiment. It is the sort of maturity that does not characterise any but the best of Indian writing in English. And this book alone would stand testimony to the need for more translations of not only Indian literature but those of so many cultures.
Abhay’s understanding of the space and his skill in translating verse and curating these anthologies came rushing out the pages of the book. It is an understanding that—not surprisingly—goes beyond literary constructs, abstractions and devices, straight into the heart of the culture whether it is Brazil or Bihar.
And this whole definition of poet-diplomat started to make complete sense. I am eager to talk to him and so here he is, joining me from his hotel room in the Andamans, where he is currently on a work trip.
ABOUT ABHAY K
Abhay K. is a poet, diplomat, editor and translator. He is the author of a dozen poetry books including ‘Monsoon’ (Sahitya Akademi) and the editor The Book of Bihari Literature (HarperCollins India). He received the SAARC Literature Award 2013. His poem-song 'Earth Anthem' has been translated into over 150 languages.
Buy The Book Of Bihari Literature: https://amzn.to/3VidKqq
WHAT'S THAT WORD?!
Co-host Pranati "Pea" Madhav joins Ramjee Chandran in "What's That Word?!", where they discuss the interesting word, "LIMERICK".
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There’s much interest of late about the Chola empire.
For many reasons. The reason that looms large is the recent blockbuster movie, Ponniyin Selvan, which, is all about the most famous of the Cholas, Raja Raja.
The Cholas were one of the longest running empires in history. The earliest historic references to the Cholas dates back to 300 BC and the empire was disestablished in 1279 AD. That’s just shy of 1600 years. By comparison the Mughal empire ran from 1526 - 1857—that’s under 350 years.
While the Indian region was invaded and occupied variously for thousands of years, the Cholas were significant in their thalassocratic—or maritime—escapades in South East Asia. Their trade routes extended to Guangzhou in China and the silk route on the other side.
They ruled the Maldives and Sri Lanka and clearly they knew where to sail to and where to fight.
And there was no greater time in all the Chola years than during the rule of Raja Raja Chozhan that ran from 985 to 1014, about three decades. If you made a list of all the stuff he achieved from infrastructure and construction to military campaigns across the south and overseas, you would find it hard to figure how someone could do so much today, leave alone over a thousand years ago.
My guest today is Kamini Dandapani. She is a New York based corporate executive—Chase Manhattan Bank and McKinsey consulting. She does not call herself a historian. As a hobby she started a blog writing about historical places she visited in the south of India. There’s a link to her blog in her bio below. She says that Aleph, the reputable publishing house, called and asked to write a book.
And she did. This book is titled Raja Raja Chola, King Of Kings. I chose this book to present on this podcast because it is a wonderfully structured book.
The book is broken down into easily digestible chapters and Kamini strikes no elegant postures in her recounting the rule of one of the most respected kings of the world. In the parlance of the present, a man we might refer to as woke, efficient and progressive.
Kamini’s biography brings us closer to the history of the south in a way that cannot be replaced by comic books and movies.
She is a writer, a historian, a Carnatic singer, A Bharatanatyam dancer, a trained western classical pianist and she joins me now from her home in Manhattan.
ABOUT KAMINI DANDAPANI
Kamini Dandapani lives New York. She has had training in Carnatic music, Bharatanatyam and Pianoforte, She moved to the US to study and work, Her blog, Tales of South India resulted in the writing of her book about Rajaraja Chola, published by Aleph.
Buy Rajaraja Chola, King Of Kings: https://amzn.to/3OrTuQg
WHAT'S THAT WORD?!
Co-host Pranati "Pea" Madhav joins Ramjee Chandran in "What's That Word?!", where they discuss the interesting phrase, "GIVING AN INDIAN ANSWER".
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There’s something about Huma. Something happens a few seconds after you meet her. You fall in love with her.
Now, this immediate attraction is not for the typical reasons—of which admittedly there are many. And it has nothing to do with things like innate goodness, inner light and such other syrup. Well, I'm putting it down to some “cannot tell what it is x-factor” and I’m moving on.
My guest today is Huma Abedin. She works with Secretary Hillary Clinton. Huma is former Deputy Chief Of Staff of Hillary Clinton and at present, something even more central, I’m assuming.
Huma has worked with Hillary Clinton in this job for over 25 years. It isn't an easy job. I imagine that it would take not only a tough internal spirit, and a strong work ethic of course, but requires something more deeply intellectual to be able to comprehend the meaning of such a job and do it well.
It was not the simplest thing for Huma Abedin to have lived in the Venn diagram overlap of being BOTH an American AND a Muslim whilst living in the penumbra of the Clintons and the White House.
This, more than anything, summarises the ethic, the plurality, the dualism if you like, of her book Both/And, that I will discuss today with her.
Both/And is a 500-page memoir of Huma’s life…till date. It has her life from childhood, her parents, her growing up years in Saudi Arabia and then in the United States of course, and all her years working for Hillary Clinton.
Reading all the reviews of her book in the international press, I found the central theme that ran ran through much of the world's press—newspapers, TV—reviewing Both/And tending towards the trivial and reductive—rather than her as an author, a thinker, her faith and her pivotal role as an assistant to one of the most powerful women in the world. One who was this close to becoming the first woman president of the United States.
But when I read Both/And, I discovered in it, a woman, a writer, a polyglot, a diplomat, and a sponge to knowledge and—I repeat—something more deeply intellectual that helps her comprehend the true meaning of her job.
With Both/And Huma steps out from stage left, right into her own spotlight…and maybe a career in politics? I am privileged to be able to ask that and other questions of her today.
ABOUT HUMA ABEDIN
Huma Abedin has spent her entire career in public service and national politics, beginning as an intern in First Lady Hillary Clinton’s office in 1996. After four years in the White House, she worked in the U.S. Senate as Senior Advisor to Senator Clinton and was Traveling Chief of Staff for Clinton’s 2008 presidential campaign. In 2009, she was appointed Deputy Chief of Staff at the U.S. Department of State. Huma served as Vice Chair of Hillary for America in 2016, resulting in the first woman elected nominee of a major political party. She currently serves as Hillary Clinton’s Chief of Staff. Born in the United States and raised in Saudi Arabia, Huma moved back to the U.S. in 1993. She lives in New York City with her son, Jordan.
Buy Both/And: A Life in Many Worlds: https://amzn.to/3EpDlHY
WHAT'S THAT WORD?!
Co-host Pranati "Pea" Madhav joins Ramjee Chandran in "What's That Word?!", where they discuss the interesting origins of the word, "PABLUM"
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Music credits: Daddy_s_Music and ArtSlop_Flodur - Pixabay
The way I read the book, the story is about the travails of a young Indian who must make the long and labyrinthine transition from boy to man.
A difficult job when a large offset of one's opportunities in middle class India is being beholden to family, with conservative family elders and conversations in a minefield of verbal taboos.
It is hard to hold down an adult conversation with elders—always an uncomfortable thing—and incurably hard to avoid.
To wit, when you are spoken to as a perennial child right into your adulthood, there is little scope for quiet and confident assertiveness and individualism. Personas must change to suit whatever pleases the current conversation.
And all this while there's the business of growing up to contend with. Sometimes so difficult a job that many don't ever fully make it to what might be considered manhood—at least by the the stereotypical norms of the rest of the world.
An ethic that is skilfully captured by my guest today the author, Jerry Pinto.
You might say that Jerry understands the Indian middle class. His book The Education of Yuri is what people in literature would call, a bildungsroman—which is a novel about the growing up years.
It is a story of a feckless 15-year old middle class Indian teen who must make decisions about where his life is headed in the time of changing goalposts, moods and largely predictable hormones.
Jerry Pinto’s narrative sucks you into the story.
The Education Of Yuri captures the college ethic of the 70s and hits you with a litany of cultural references from the decades. Those who grew up around then would smile at references like…
“Ground Control to Major Tom”
James Hadley Chase's "No Orchids For Miss Blandish"
Hotel California… "Bring your alibis"
The 70s also were a time when the contrasting pressures of what someone wanted to do and what was good for them could be hard to handle.
So Jerry places his protagonist in a situation where he is largely free of oppressive family pressures and through Yuri’s experiences, he allows the reader a view of how society was structured.
Yuri’s decision to abandon his course in the sciences in favour of the liberal arts being an example.
And then Jerry captures the disposition of the 70s English language major and empties out his literary arsenal in this book and uses these artfully in his descriptions of Yuri’s normal life of friendships, tawdry sexual escapades, romance and inevitably, poetry.
I've been a fan of his writing—his columns and books—for many years. And it is therefore my pleasure to present him on my show.
ABOUT JERRY PINTO
Jerry Pinto is a writer and poet based in Mumbai. His books include the novels Em and the Big Hoom (winner of the Hindu Prize and the Crossword Book Award) and Murder in Mahim (winner of the Valley of Words Award, and shortlisted for the Crossword Award); the non-fiction book Helen: The Life and Times of an H-Bomb (winner of the National Award for the Best Book on Cinema); and two books of poetry, I Want a Poem and Other Poems and Asylum. Jerry Pinto received the Windham-Campbell Prize and the Sahitya Akademi Award.
Buy The Education Of Yuri: https://amzn.to/3DJ9Ejl
WHAT'S THAT WORD?!
Co-host Pranati "Pea" Madhav joins Ramjee Chandran in "What's That Word?!", where they discuss the interesting origins of the word, "FECKLESS"
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There is an old saying, “Dead men tell no tales”.
But how wonderful and useful it would be if we could follow a conversation into the afterlife? And what more wonderful than if you wrote about it and then won the Booker Prize for your efforts? Is this the stuff from which dreams are made?
Clearly true if you consider my guest today, Shehan Karunatilaka, winner of the The Booker Prize 2022.
In Shehan’s novel, The Seven Moons Of Maali Almeida, the main protagonist is dead but the character is alive. The novel—set in a terrible patch of Sri Lankan history between 1983 and 1990—is the story of a photojournalist who dies. In the afterlife, he finds himself in the "In-between"—a state between "Down There" which is life on earth and "The Light"—and where that is, is revealed at the end of the book.
The protagonist is confronted by—of all things—a bureaucracy in the afterlife and he is told he has a week, or seven moons, to find out how he died if he wanted to make it to The Light.
The novel touches the reader in many ways. Not the least to wonder what happens if we were indeed to find bureaucracy in the afterlife. Even the disappointment that visits us upon such a proposition is not rational. Yet…
Shehan uses the second person as a literary device. Literary fiction written in the second-person is rare. This style is unusual because the narrator tells the story to the reader using the personal pronoun "you." The perspective suggests that the reader is the protagonist.
Shehan Karunatilaka’s prose is compelling…gripping, even. The turns of phrase and word come together like play dough in what seems to be an absently crafted sculpture.
Intelligent prose is never without its humour and Shehan’s prose has a river of funny as its undercurrent.
He defines a queue in Sri Lanka as “…an amorphous curve with multiple entry points.” (Clearly, a south Asian malaise.)
"The afterlife is a tax office and everyone wants a rebate."
"You drift among the broken people with blood on their breath."
All this and you are still on Page 10.
But humour is peppered through the entire narrative and some of it is recognisable to typical snarky South Indian humour. This on page 135: ”...frilly shirt tailored by a blind man”.
In the context though, the humour is a noir humour that characterises places in the world that are in strife—such as Ireland, parts of the Middle East and Shehan’s home country, Sri Lanka.
I really cannot wait to ask him about all this.
At the time of this recording, Shehan has just won the Booker Prize, a little over a week ago. I know that the entire world’s media waits to talk to him and so, I am particularly happy that he chose to spend this time with me.
ABOUT SHEHAN KARUNATILAKA
Shehan Karunatilaka is a Sri Lankan writer whose first book, Chinaman, won the Commonwealth Book Prize, the DSC Prize for South Asian Literature and the Gratiaen Prize, and was shortlisted for the Shakti Bhatt First Book Prize. Seven Moons of Maali Almeida is his second book, it won the Booker Prize 2022.
Buy The Seven Moons Of Maali Almeida: https://amzn.to/3gUhnDw
WHAT'S THAT WORD?!
Co-host Pranati "Pea" Madhav joins Ramjee Chandran in "What's That Word?!", where they discuss the interesting origins of the phrase, "DEAD MEN TELL NO TALES"
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There is a point late in the lives of the very accomplished, when they unscrew the caps of their pens and write a compelling memoir of their lives.
But how does a self-effacing journalist write an autobiography? By not writing one. Not in the stock sense, anyway.
My guest today is journalist TJS George. He is 94 years old. His life as a working journalist began when he was 19. That was in 1947—in the months following India’s Independence. And ever since, George has had a ringside seat to India—and to every twist in its tale.
Journalists always have the best stories. After years of working their profession as a “little pitcher with big ears”—fly on the wall, if you prefer—they wait impatiently to fill the ears of the world with anecdotes.
But instead of all that, George’s latest book, “The Dismantling Of India”, is the closest we have got to an autobiography—unless, of course, he decides to up and write a classic memoir.
I read this book as a narrative history of India to be harvested from the biographical portraits of 35 Indians. They include people from art, entertainment, politics, science, business, crime and cause—profiles—at times in contrast; sometimes in concert.
But the word “dismantling” in the title of the book amounts to disappointment, because from the day he joined as a rookie reporter, the newly-born India has been on a downward trajectory, aging poorly—day after year after decade.
Biographies bring people to life, as a tapestry of the stories of their lives. An autobiography is supposed to do the same thing—a personal narrative gives an author licence—to a point of view, an explanation, or even an excuse. George has no use for excuses and his writing leaves no wiggle room for explanation.
The reason I equate this book to an autobiography is because it seemed to me that he was expressing his own life story through the aggregate of the lives of those he has profiled.
TJS George’s writing is not misplaced modesty. It seems to come from a conviction that he is—first and last—a journalist and thus, the story should come first, second and last. And any trace of the writer’s presence be excised—except by good example, to every journalist.
ABOUT TJS GEORGE
He has worked as a journalist and editor across India and Southeast Asia. He is co-founder before of Asiaweek in Hong Kong. Returning to India, he has worked with the Indian Express as Editor and as a columnist. He has written 20 books, including biographies of Krishna Menon, Lee Kuan Yew, Nargis and MS Subbulakshmi. He is a recipient of the 2011 Padma Bhushan and numerous other awards. He lives in Bangalore.
Buy The Dismantling Of India: https://amzn.to/3zaug2x
WHAT'S THAT WORD?!
Co-host Pranati "Pea" Madhav joins Ramjee Chandran in "What's That Word?!", where they discuss the interesting origins of the word, "SCOUNDREL."
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In the Indian epic, the Mahabharata, the central character, the fulcrum of the story is Draupadi…in my view. But epics in mythology, the Mahabharata included, are full of tales of male valour. Mythology instills in its male protagonists, high chivalry. Men are always saving women.
But whenever women are warriors, they are usually fierce and angry, wreaking vengeful havoc everywhere. I haven’t read many historical or mythological stories of calm and collected women whose battle strategies were super-intelligent and saved a bunch of men.
Men, valour. Women, wrath. But from where do these messy notions spring?
From the stories we have been told. From subjective telling of history, the epics, folklore and mythology.
In the Mahabharata, we learned the story of how Yudhishtra gambled away his wife in a game of dice with his cousins and then sat back helplessly and humiliated while she was manhandled in the court. And then of course he went to war and avenged…I am not sure what he was avenging when he was the one who went and gambled her away. And then how did the wife, Draupadi, feel about being used as a poker chip? No one asked her, clearly.
Obviously, this narrative needs to change to include questions such as this. And the good thing is that it might just be happening, at an accelerated pace.
My guest today, Koral Dasgupta—one among a tribe of writers who seek to re-tell stories from the epics, but from a woman’s perspective. Today we talk about her book Draupadi—third in a five-part series of women in mythology, called the Sati series.
Most of us in India know Hindu philosophy only by what was repurposed for kids without nuance. As adults—whether or not plumbing the depths of this philosophy is material to our daily mundane, transactions—we find it lends itself to endless interpretation and intellectual excursions.
The blurbs on her book praising her, are from noted and respected authors, like Chitra Divakaruni, Saikat Majumdar and Pavan Varma—all of whom have been my guests on this podcast. And Namita Gokhale—whom I hope we will have the honour to feature before long.
Koral is deeply philosophical as you will hear. So, let’s hear her then.
ABOUT KORAL DASGUPTAKoral Dasgupta has published an eclectic range of books. Draupadi is her seventh. Besides India, Koral’s books are shelved in university libraries across the world, including Harvard, Columbia, Pennsylvania, Chicago, Wales, Duke, North Carolina and Texas. Her work is discussed in the context of gender studies, art, myth and ecocritical literature. Koral’s fourth book has been optioned for screen adaptation.
Buy Draupadi: https://amzn.to/3D5LNLJ
WHAT'S THAT WORD?!
Co-host Pranati "Pea" Madhav joins Ramjee Chandran in "What's That Word?!", where they discuss the phrase "self-fulfilling prophesy."
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What and when was the first English language novel?
There are some contenders for this honour, but the most plausible for me would be Pamela by Samuel Richardson—first published in 1740 and several times since. Widely accepted as the first English novel, it is a racy, saucy, sexually-orientated story—and , of course, for that reason it was the world’s first bestseller.
In 1832, the first book covers started to happen. In America and Britain, these books, with designed covers, sold for a penny. They were largely the retelling of gothic horror stories. For that reason these books came to called Penny Dreadful.
A significant moment in the history of publishing was the advent of the American brothers Albert and Charles Boni, who started a mail-order publishing company. The pioneering efforts of Albert Boni resulted in the creation of the major publishing company , Random House—so called because they decided that their choice of published literature would be random by nature.
Their success was followed in 1935 by Penguin—a hugely successful British publisher that printed clearly branded books that appealed to everyone. And mention of Penguin brings me to my guest today, David Davidar—the best known name in Indian publishing
David was hired by Penguin in 1985. First as an editor and then very quickly as Publisher, David took Penguin places—from publishing six books in 1987 to 150 titles annually.
By the time he moved to Penguin Canada in 2004, David had published a stable of thoroughbreds—here’s a sample—Shashi Tharoor, Vikram Seth, Ruskin Bond, Romila Thapar, Salman Rushdie and William Dalrymple.
One of my earlier guests on this show, author Pavan Varma made singular mention of having been first published by David.
David Davidar is, at once, a publisher, an editor, a novelist of three wonderful books. He runs Aleph Book Company—a top-shelf publishing house, in partnership with Rupa Publications, and continues to battle alongside the gods of academe with weapons of mass typography.
Those in the business will not need me to say anything. For those who are readers of books, who might not be familiar with the publishing industry, you can easily attribute a large part of your proud book collection to one man. And I feel privileged to be able to introduce him to you today.
ABOUT DAVID DAVIDARDavid Davidar is an Indian novelist and publisher. He is the author of three published novels, The House of Blue Mangoes, The Solitude of Emperors, and Ithaca. In parallel to his writing career, Davidar has been a publisher for over a quarter-century. David Davidar has been around books all his life.
Buy A Case Of Indian Marvels: https://amzn.to/3VhkEMO
Listen to Constantine Cavafy's poem, "ITHACA", the inspiration for David's book by the same name, recited by Sean Connery : https://youtu.be/i8is5ZE4_CU
WHAT'S THAT WORD?!
Co-host Pranati "Pea" Madhav joins Ramjee Chandran in "What's That Word?!", where they discuss "#"—which is the "hash" or "pound" symbol.
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Cover photo: Rachna Singh
Different cities have different things they buy into.
In Paris there’s style—you never want to look sloppy in Paris. In New York it’s the energy of movement—try walking slowly on the sidewalk and you’ll have Fran Leibowitz come up and say "Hey! Pretend it’s a city."
In Bangalore, there is a buy-in to preserve trees.
You can ride a motorcycle on a crowded sidewalk, drive up the wrong way on a one-way street and only mildly annoy others. But try cutting a tree and the passing Bangalorean will give you a sharp look and probably make a quick call to the authorities. Indeed most homes have trees and apartment buildings are sometimes built around an existing tree. So Bangaloreans would not be surprised to see a new apartment building with a tree growing right through its floors.
This isn’t new though. Something about trees has found its way into the DNA of the city and indeed in all of us—after all in our DNA, we are part human, part city.
And the sense of greenery has expressed itself in the city having two major, botanically rich parks—Cubbon Park and Lal Bagh—each as large and as old as some of the greatest city parks in the world. Hyde Park in London, Gorky Park in Moscow, Central Park, New York, and there are others.
My guest Roopa Pai is author of the book, Cubbon Park—The Green Heart Of Bangalore.
When Roopa was researching she called and asked to interview me. I said yes of course, immediately. More than anything, this appealed to my sense of duty. Indeed, I was personally involved in an investigative story about Cubbon Park titled, The Conspiracy To Kill Cubbon Park. The story was based on some builders and politicians who were spoiling to parcel off this historic lung space to developers.
I grew up in Bangalore. The Park has been a part of my life. Roopa made me realize that I share a connection with people I will probably never meet.
Because each of us has been alone with our deepest introspection when we experience the solitude of Cubbon Park. A bliss of birds and dogs—and oddly, the company of a hundred other humans who exist and at the same time, don’t.
Roopa Pai is a widely published author having written several children’s book ranging from Indian mythology to Economics.
She is an engineer—of computer science—a restaurant reviewer and a sometimes travel writer.
Her ability to deal with such diverse subjects comes from Roopa being a fascinating subject for an urban petri dish. And beneath a charming and unassuming front, an incisive and perceptive mind.
Let’s find out all about her and about Cubbon Park.
ABOUT ROOPA PAI
Roopa Pai is one of India’s best-known writers for children. She is Bangalore-based and has written over 25 books, ranging from picture books to chapter books and fiction to non-fiction, on themes as varied as sci-fi fantasy, popular science, math, history, economics, Indian philosophy, life skills, and medicine. When she is not writing, Roopa leads groups of children and young people on history and heritage walks across Bangalore and Karnataka, as part of her job as director of a company she co-founded, BangaloreWalks.Buy Cubbon Park: The Green Heart Of Bengaluru: https://amzn.to/3V0cJ6oWHAT'S THAT WORD?!
Co-host Pranati "Pea" Madhav joins Ramjee Chandran in "What's That Word?!", where they discuss the phrase "UP STICKS (AND MOVE)".
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The great author Gustav Flaubert once said, “The art of writing is the art of discovering what you believe."
I am not buying that entirely. I believe that the art of writing is to make others believe what you want them to believe.
And by that, I don’t mean only story telling. I mean all writing. Direct and compelling prose can raise even the most academic and arcane subjects to literature.
Sometimes academicians couch their findings in thick and opaque prose—sometimes because they don’t know how to express themselves in a more comprehensible manner. You know, in simple sentences without using jargon as crutches.
Sometimes because they think they won’t be taken seriously if they expressed themselves in a less formal style.
And some of them are great writers and storytellers. So they go looking for an outlet for their creativity and happily some find it.
My guest today is author and historian, Devika Rangachari. Clearly, she found her muse. She is both versatile and prolific. Her writing has spanned everything from a post-doctoral thesis on 10th century women rulers of Orissa to children’s books.
Reading her is a delight. Her latest book is titled Train To Tanjore and is the absorbing account of a young schoolboy who battles small town orthodoxy in the time of World War II.
Devika captures the period and the honest sentiment that RK Narayan once did in Swami And Friends. She does this with her unique literary sparkle.
As you can tell, I enjoyed reading this book. Equally I enjoyed reading some of her academic writing. And today, I am delighted to be able to share her with you. So here she is joining me from her home in Doha, Qatar.
ABOUT DEVIKA RANGACHARI
Dr. Devika Rangachari is an award-winning writer whose book, Queen of Ice was on the White Raven list, won the Neev Young Adult Book Award, was shortlisted for the Sahitya Akademi’s Bal Sahitya Puraskar. Her other books include The Train to Tanjore, Queen of Fire (Parag Honour List 2022), Queen of Earth (Parag Honour List 2021; shortlisted for the Neev YA and the JK Women AutHer awards), 10 Indian Monarchs Whose Amazing Stories You May Not Know, Tales of Love and Adventure, Swami Vivekananda—A Man with a Vision, Harsha Vardhana, The Merry Mischief of Gopal Bhand, The Wit of Tenali Raman and Growing Up (IBBY Honour List 2002). She also received a prestigious national fellowship of the ministry of culture in India to research aspects of gender and historical fiction in Indian children’s literature.
Buy Train To Tanjore (Penguin Random House): https://amzn.to/3dy8Gh1
WHAT'S THAT WORD?!
Co-host Pranati "Pea" Madhav joins Ramjee Chandran in "What's That Word?!", where they discuss the word "QUEEN".
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History was never considered to be a subject that would lead to gainful employment and I dare say, rewarding matrimony. Maybe that’s why we have paid little respect to it in India.
Maybe that’s why our records are shoddy. Most museums and public places of history are disrespectfully maintained—and shabby when compared to those in other countries.
Through the ages, the lasting history of India has been principally discovered and recorded by travellers from overseas—from Megasthenes in 300BC to Al Masudi in 950 to Thomas Roe in 1615 and then so many other illustrious people during and since.
And now, there is a sudden interest in Indian history.
Of the number of books that publishers send me to consider for this podcast, a great many are about Indian history—in one form or another.
This interest in Indian history I guess was kicked off by recent western historians—and the trend is carried forward by so many wonderful Indian historians and writers—each compelling, entertaining and insightful.
Well, it’s all good. It’s a great time to be discovering ourselves—and maybe this will cause our public spaces to improve. And I pray, curated by historians and and other men and women of science and not politicians.
My guest today, is John Zubrzycki. He is the author of several great books on Indian history. His most recent book is titled The Shortest History Of India. He artfully presents thousands of years of the history of India in a little over 250 pages.
His earlier book, Jadoowallahs, Jugglers and Jinns is an amazing history of the little known but truly fantastic contribution of India to the world of magic, to such a degree that western magicians believed they needed to dress up as Indian mystics to be credible to western audiences.
So much to ask him. So let’s get right to it. Here he is joining me now from his home in Australia.
ABOUT JOHN ZUBRZYCKI
John Zubrzycki is an Australian author who has been studying Indian history for more than forty years. He has worked in India as a diplomat and foreign correspondent, taught Indian studies and written extensively on Indian society, culture and politics. He is the author of four books. He majored in South Asian history and Hindi at the Australian National University and has a PhD in Indian history from the University of New South Wales. John was the deputy foreign editor at The Australian before becoming a full-time writer.
Buy The Shortest History Of India (Picador): https://amzn.to/3RO2hwW
Buy Jadoowallahs, Jugglers And Jinns (Picador): https://amzn.to/3RXJoYv
Listen to a reading of William Jones's poem, Caissa: https://archive.org/details/AGameOfChess
WHAT'S THAT WORD?!
Co-host Pranati "Pea" Madhav joins Ramjee Chandran in "What's That Word?!", where they discuss the words "magic" and "hocus-pocus".
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Being raised by very famous parents has its benefits. But equally, it is difficult to emerge from their shadows in which one must twist, and then find a spot upstage—for one’s creativity.
Growing up in India in the 70s was materially different from what it seems to be today. Materially being the operative expression, because there was not much money to go around.
For example, it did not really matter what car you drove…because there wasn’t much choice of automobiles. I’ll spare you the litany of examples of what else you could not do. But the good thing was that there were other ways by which you gained respect in society. Being well educated well informed and well-spoken—this is the domain of the nerds.
In America nerds are objects of derision. In India, they favoured candidates for matrimony. We marry them on priority.
And in the time when regular middle income folks had no choice but to study hard and get a good job, being liberal towards one’s children was something that was highly risky—like sending your kids to a Montessori school. Potentially denying them the feral ability to claw and elbow one’s way into a packed city bus.
My guest today is Mallika Sarabhai. She sums up all of the above.
She had famous parents—Mrinalini and Vikram Sarabhai. She went to a Montessori school. And then she graduated from the Indian Institute of Management-Ahmedabad and then got a PhD in management by the time she was 22. And then she devoted her life to the Arts. Details of her career and her successes and awards are in the public record. And until her friends made her change it, she drove an old Indian SUV so her many dogs could fit comfortably.
Her recent book titled—In Free Fall, My Experiments With Living—is not as much an autobiography as a memoir of specific events in her life and a self realisation through curing her illnesses through alternate medicine.
Reading her book is to connect those dots to see a picture of her that is candid and funny—and, for all the descriptions of her troubles—is never tragic.
In a minute you’ll understand why. Let’s meet her.
ABOUT MALLIKA SARABHAI
Mallika Sarabhai is a dancer, actor and activist. As one of India’s leading choreographers and dancers, she has been co-director of the Darpana Academy for Performing Arts for nearly forty years. She played the role of Draupadi in Peter Brook’s The Mahabharata, first in French and then English, performing in France, Germany, Spain, Switzerland, the United States, Australia, Japan and Scotland. An activist for education, human rights and women’s empowerment, her numerous stage productions have raised awareness, highlighted crucial issues and advocated change, developing her own contemporary dance vocabulary to create short and full-length works that have been presented throughout India and in over fifty countries of the world.
Buy In Free Fall: My Experiments With Living: https://amzn.to/3RYnggk
WHAT'S THAT WORD?!
Co-host Pranati "Pea" Madhav joins Ramjee Chandran in "What's That Word?!", where they discuss the words "MAMA AND PAPA".
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Photo credits: Jayanti Sagra
Historically and traditionally, the arts have enjoyed the patronage of kings.
We all know that culture broadens minds. It’s an important basis by which society finds expression and happiness. So it is in the larger common good that culture has been encouraged. It binds a society and gives it an identity. And a personality. And sets up the basis for cultural interaction with other societies.
People like kings patronise the arts to allow its exponents the freedom to live in their minds and pursue their muse. Musicians, dancers, artists, dramatists and storytellers have enjoyed the patronage of the palace.
The Maharajas of Mysore—many of them—have pursued the arts themselves. The most notable among them being Jayachamarajendra Wadiyar—the last Maharaja of Mysore before his kingdom acceded to the Union of Indian states in 1947. He was a thinker, a published philosopher, a patron of the arts—but importantly, he, a patron without bias.
While there is a rich legacy of Carnatic music patronised by him, Wadiyar fulfilled the last wish of legendary composer Richard Strauss. This is a little known fact.
In 1950, he sponsored a performance at the Royal Albert Hall, by London’s Philharmonia Orchestra led by German conductor Wilhelm Furtwängler and with soprano Kirsten Flagstad singing Strauss's final composition, Four Last Songs.
The Maharaja was an accomplished musician too. Schooled in Carnatic and Western classical music, he tried to make meaning of the two forms and worked tirelessly to find a blend—later admitting that is was difficult. (As a musician, I want to say that unfortunately too many musicians have been pitiless in this pursuit.)
Chronicling this unusual Maharaja is my guest today, Deepti Navaratna, author of an unconventionally structured biography of Wadiyar, titled The Maverick Maharaja.
But as I researched her, I realised that she is unusual. By my reckoning, she is a wonderful Carnatic singer. And she is a neuroscientist, which means she is licensed to dissect brains in a laboratory.
Scientific research is a linear and process driven discipline and conclusions are reached by goals and planned milestones. Surprises are often not welcome. The other side of her, is music. And the point of musical composition is to defy linearity while sticking to a framework of rules and conventions. The point of music is surprise.
Maybe the two are connected. And maybe it takes a maverick to make the connection. Let’s find out.
ABOUT DEEPTI NAVARATNA
A musician and neuroscientist, she served as the Regional Director, Indira Gandhi National Centre for the Arts. She directed the centre’s research, academic and outreach activities at the intersection of arts and sciences. She is currently the TV Raman Pai Chair of Excellence and Professor of Humanities at the National Institute Of Advanced Studies, Bangalore.
Buy The Maverick Maharaja: https://amzn.to/3ALLovE The Mysore Anthem composed by the Maharaja of Mysore, JC Wadiyar and imagined by Dr Deepti Navaratna: https://youtu.be/axLDJ-HtQIc
WHAT'S THAT WORD?!
Co-host Pranati "Pea" Madhav joins Ramjee Chandran in "What's That Word?!", where they discuss the word "MAVERICK".
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Every once in a while, you read a book, watch a gripping movie or a TV show; and you ask yourself the question, “Was that a true story?”
And then you spend hours googling the hell out of it. How great would it be if you could not find the answer and not be able to reach a conclusion!
As every great storyteller knows, the better you tell a story the more you make it come to life. Conversely, even if you tell a real story poorly, it will not ring true.
Let’s meet a great storyteller now.
My guest is author Sudipta Sen Gupta. She used to be a top level marketing executive turned academic, historian and author. Her debut novel is titled, Aasma-i-Noor. In Persian it loosely means A Sky of Light or even, a Universe of Light...depending on how expansive you’re feeling today.
Aasma-i-Noor is a diamond. It is a rare, red diamond that came from the Kollur mine in Golconda, the same mine that gave us the Koh-i-Noor (means Mountain Of Light) and Darya-i-Noor (meaning Sea Of Light). All great names…clearly all tributes to Total Internal Refraction.
In Sudipta’s novel, the history of this diamond is linked to the heart of the events surrounding the rise and fall of Siraj-ud-Daulah and his chief nemesis Robert Clive.
And around this time is the last anyone heard of the Aasma-i-Noor, leaving the question: was this whole bloody pivotal point in the history of India caused by the fascination of a few men for a gemstone?
Artfully, the story spills into the present day with a couple of treasure hunters in Kolkata finding clues from history to be able to locate this diamond. At this point the novel suddenly takes on the rush of a Dan Brown thriller and I will leave the rest for you to read.
As for separating history from historical fiction, I have rarely read this done in so deft a manner.
It is every debut novelist’s aspiration that their debut novel must set the world on fire. If Aasma-i-Noor doesn’t do that, it is the fault of the world.
That said, I am privileged to have Sudipta here as my guest today.
ABOUT SUDIPTA SEN GUPTA
Sudipta Sen Gupta is an associate professor in the School of Management at GD Goenka University. After completing her graduation in physics from Presidency College, Kolkata, and MBA from Faculty of Management Studies (FMS), Delhi University, she worked in senior corporate management roles for over 20 years. She helped build multiple well-known brands and powered multinational organizations to success, winning several national and global awards and recognitions along the way. In 2017, she decided to leave the corporate world and join academics, allowing her time to complete her PhD and return to her first love—Indian history. Aasma-i-Noor: The Cursed Jewel is the result of that love.
Buy Aama-i-Noor: https://amzn.to/3ASAYM4
WHAT'S THAT WORD?!
Co-host Pranati "Pea" Madhav joins Ramjee Chandran in "What's That Word?!", where they discuss the word "WIT: and joining them is a guest from the United States.
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Indians live in many skins.
We deal with an extraordinarily diverse and multi-layered thing that we call “Indian culture”.
There have been various attempts to reduce its complexities to something simple that represents the sum of its parts. Often, a fool’s errand, not easily expressed by say, a fondness for Bollywood and spicy food.
Such cultural differences are stark when we travel; not the differences with other cultures of the world—we always knew that—but but the cultural differences between Indians that we don’t notice so much at home.
Finding out that you have more in common with a western colleague than from an Indian from a different part of India with a different language, a different religion and different tastes in pop culture can be hard to articulate.
My guest today is Saikat Majumdar. His novel, The Middle Finger explores this dynamic with the insight and sensitivity of a perpetual student of the world.
At the story telling level, the novel is entertaining. But like any competent literary work, the storytelling plays second violin to the complexity of the composition.
I had heard of Saikat Majumdar in stray reviews but I first encountered Saikat’s writing in a review of a novel he had written in a newspaper.
There’s always something about class and competence that jumps out at you. When I googled him I was delighted to find he was a much published author and and an English language academician.
And today I am delighted to invite Saikat Majumdar as my guest onThe Literary City.
ABOUT SAIKAT MAJUMDAR
Saikat Majumdar has taught at Stanford University, was a Fellow at Wellesley College, and is currently Professor of English & Creative Writing at Ashoka University. He writes regularly on higher education and literature in different venues, including the Hindu, Hindustan Times, Los Angeles Review of Books, and the Times Higher Education. His other novels include The Scent of God and The Firebird/Play House, which narrates a young boy’s destructive obsession with his mother’s life as a theatre actress. His works of nonfiction and criticism include Prose of the World, The Critic as Amateur, and College: Pathways of Possibility.
Buy The Middle Finger: https://amzn.to/3T5lifm
WHAT'S THAT WORD?!
Co-host Pranati "Pea" Madhav joins Ramjee Chandran in "What's That Word?!", where they discuss the phrases "flipping the bird" and "having a jones".
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Narration music from Uppbeat License code: KODPRRUVGWXXYGWS
Chess is a finite game with finite variables. Yet, phrases like “infinite possibilities” and “unpredictable outcome” seem completely appropriate when discussing it.
It begs the question, how finite is finite? Finite can be a large number. So large that it may as well be infinite. For example, they have calculated that the number of possibilities in moves and resulting positions in the first 10 moves is a 14-digit number- 69,352,859,712,417. It's called the Shannon number.
Yes, that’s finite. But not for some. I can’t count that high myself.
And then they say chess is the only game in the world without an element of chance. There’s no wind factor, no pitch whose inconsistencies make a ball wobble, no noisy and chanting spectators, no rain or being dealt a poor hand—there are two players and only they are responsible for the outcome.
But far from chess being robotic, the most important variable in chess is the human variable. But with humans all variables don’t have to be outside variables. And when outside variables don’t count, we turn inwards. And thus chess becomes a game where strategies go beyond the books.
My guest today is Viswanathan Anand, Grandmaster, World Champion title holder several times over. He is the author of Mind Master, Winning Lessons From A Champion’s Life. He’s a super grandmaster of the game and was reigning world champion for years, until he recently handed the crown to Magnus Carlsen.
At that level of the game, when you have, as opponents, equally matched grandmasters, who have narrowed it down predictable lines of play, all sorts of other factors come into it.
In his book, Anand said that in cases he looks for little tells, like poker players do. The difference in the way an opponent breathes in places, a tightening of the shoulder muscles, a change in demeanour.
Articulate and well spoken and possessed of a great, and often wacky, sense of humour—how bad a can a guy be when his inspiration is Monty Python—Anand’s book is a delight to read.
At so many levels. As motivational lessons for winning. For chess buffs like me who worship the game. Or as the autobiography of a world champion who has the gift of humility on his side. You don’t need to know a whit about chess for this book to make sense.
I spend the last couple of days reading his book and it is my privilege to be able to invite him as a guest today.
ABOUT VISHWANATHAN ANAND
Vishy Anand is a five-time world chess champion. India's first grandmaster (1988), he is one of the few to have surpassed an Elo rating of 2800. He is deputy president of FIDE. He inspired a generation of chess players in India. Vishy is an astronomy buff and an avid reader on math, economics and current affairs. He supports many charitable causes, chief among them being that of children with neurological disabilities.
Buy Mind Master: Winning Lessons from a Champion’s Life: https://amzn.to/3C1bXiF
Buy Vishy Anand: My Best Games of Chess: https://amzn.to/3Ak7TZp
WHAT'S THAT WORD?!
Co-host Pranati "Pea" Madhav joins Ramjee Chandran in "What's That Word?!", where they discuss the phrase "tilting at windmills".
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No matter how many times you have heard it, the story of Jallianwala Bagh is terrifying. But when most of us first heard the story of the massacre, we weren’t mature enough to absorb the significance of what we were reading.
As schoolboys we were only allowed a casual and dinky relationship with our history text books. Jallianwala Bagh could pass as another tale of woe in chapter after chapter of bloody wars.
And it wasn’t until we were older and for many—let’s tell the truth here—watching the movie Gandhi—did the horror of it all come home.
My guest today is Navtej Sarna, author of Crimson Spring—in essence a book about the massacre at Jallianwala Bagh, but one that is more history than novel. It is a literary work that describes a historical tragedy through the emotions of its protagonists.
While reading his book, it struck me that we don’t preserve and portray the horrors of history in any tangible form, say, like the holocaust museums; Auschwitz and other locations.
And then it occurred to me that the broad dissemination of Indian history is principally among school children. And that includes mythology. Even ones that include mature themes, such as the Mahabharata.
No wonder then that the authors who have given us history—whether as history or as novels of historical fiction—have become bestsellers. Think William Dalrymple with over a million Twitter followers, Ram Guha, Chitra Divakaruni, Navtej Sarna, and so many others.
There is a hunger for history. And no better time than the 75th year of Indian independence to tell these tales.
Crimson Spring is but another in an impressive list of books authored by Sarna. And among them the most compelling for me is his book on his literary travels: Second Thoughts subtitled, On Books, Authors and The Writerly Life.
Through trying to find the origins and the final resting places of the great writers, Sarna introduces us to that wonderful world. And packages the most important works of literature in an easily digestible form.
He is a diplomat—former Ambassador to the United States, Israel and former High Commissioner to the United Kingdom. And he joins us today from his home in New Delhi.
I am privileged to welcome Navtej Sarna to The Literary City.
ABOUT NAVTEJ SARNANavtej Sarna was India’s Ambassador to the United States, High Commissioner to the United Kingdom, and Ambassador to Israel. He has also served as Secretary to the Government of India and as the Foreign Office Spokesperson. His earlier diplomatic assignments were in Moscow, Warsaw, Thimphu, Tehran, Geneva, and Washington DC. His literary work includes the novels The Exile and We Weren’t Lovers Like That, the short story collection Winter Evenings, non-fiction works The Book of Nanak, Second Thoughts, and Indians at Herod’s Gate, as well as two translations, Zafarnama and Savage Harvest. He is a prolific columnist and commentator on foreign policy and literary matters, contributing regularly to media platforms in India and abroad. His latest book is Crimson Spring, on the Jallianwala Bagh massacre.
Buy Crimson Spring: https://amzn.to/3BUjMqt
Buy Second Thoughts: On Books, Authors and the Writerly Life: https://amzn.to/3JBqTpo
WHAT'S THAT WORD?!
Co-host Pranati "Pea" Madhav joins Ramjee Chandran in the segment "What's That Word?", where they discuss the phrase "Out damn spot!"
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For those who might not know, when Pakistan was carved out of India to serve as a separate country for Muslims in the sub-continent, people on both sides—of a hasty defined border—found their lives uprooted.
The tales from the Partition are many and horrific. The stories expose the raw side of a humanity filled with hatred, with mobs red in tooth and claw setting upon each other. The announcement of Partition caused Hindu-Muslim violence to break out—some say unexpectedly.
Millions fled their homes in fear to cross the border to safety. Most of them had to leave their lives and all their possessions behind.
Some of them found a new home in England. They dug their heels in and got their lives back.
My guest today, Kavita Puri is a British journalist and a radio broadcaster. She is also the daughter of one of those who fled their homes. For many years now, Kavita has documented the oral histories of the immigrants from the Indian sub-continent, to a postwar Britain.
Her series called Three Pounds In My Pocket told the stories of these pioneer immigrants. Her show—Partition Voices—record the first person accounts of people directly impacted by Partition.
What are oral histories?
Academics will tell you that oral history focuses on recording and interpreting the voices of individuals who might have been left out of history. It's all about preserving an alternative form of public history.
But that’s the boring version.
Any writer or journalist will tell you that stories are about people. And their lives. Their thoughts, fears and their dreams. Recording their history requires a good measure of sensitivity. The more you feel a connection to their story, the better you can retell it.
Kavita Puri has lived inside the story of the people who were victims of the Partition and she is deeply attached to the stories she retells in Partition Voices.
Kavita was reading from the final chapter of the latest release of Partition Voices, at one point she was overcome with emotion and we had to stop recording. For this reason maybe, her book is compelling. I understand now why the book spoke to me.
And it is my privilege to be able to introduce her to speak to us all.
So here’s Kavita Puri joining me from what I suspect is a hotel room in Spain.
Kavita, welcome to The Literary City.
ABOUT KAVITA PURIKavita Puri is a British journalist, radio broadcaster, and author. Her 2019 book, Partition Voices: Untold British Stories, is based on her award-winning BBC Radio 4 documentary series of the same name. Puri has worked on BBC Newsnight as a political producer, film producer and assistant editor, and as the editor of Our World, a foreign affairs documentary programme. Her 2014 BBC Radio 4 series, Three Pounds in My Pocket, told the stories of South Asians who migrated to post-war Britain. In 2015, Puri was named Journalist of the Year by the Asian Media Awards. In 2018, then-Prime Minister Theresa May appointed Puri as a trustee of the Victoria and Albert Museum for a period of four years.
Buy Partition Voices here: https://amzn.to/3JhSz2s
WHAT'S THAT WORD?!
Co-host Pranati "Pea" Madhav joins Ramjee Chandran in the segment "What's That Word?", where they discuss the phrase "Red in tooth and claw".
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What’s literary fiction?
It’s not easily defined. Maybe because literary fiction is not what it is but it isn’t. Essentially, it is fiction writing that does not fit into any genre. Like crime, romance, horror, science-fiction, and other what have you genres.
Another characteristic of literary fiction is that the story is driven by its protagonists or characters and not by a plot. It can speak of humanity, embrace a philosophy, dwell for pages on describing something that may well be inconsequential to the subject and indeed, stray very far from whatever plot or path it may have chartered for itself.
You read literary fiction for the journey you make from cover to cover. It’s not necessarily a whodunit, such that you get to the end only to find out that the butler didn’t.
For dint of its lack of conformity to genre, I reckon, literary writing is considered an art form and therefore an idealistic higher form. So does it follow that genre based literature is somehow mass media?
And despite loud protestations to the contrary, the Nobel Prize for Literature has frequently gone mostly to writers of literary fiction. Also the Booker. To wit, literary fiction is not written with the objective of entertaining and amusing the reader. It calls for the reader to appreciate its prose.
My guest today is Omar El Akkad, a craftsman if I ever read one. A few writers—very few—begin their careers by making a mark. He’s one.
Omar’s first book, American War—a dystopian novel set in the future—received deservedly great accolade. Omar’s latest work is a novel called What Strange Paradise. It is the story of a young Syrian refugee. The narrative alternates between his journey on a refugee boat and what ostensibly happens after it washes up broken, on a shore in Greece.
Whatever it is that pundits accept as literary fiction, you might say Omar’s prose rises to it.
My introduction to him was his essay in the literary magazine, The Paris Review. I found the story—titled “Flight Paths”—so compelling that I asked my team to invite him to be my guest today on this podcast. And I was delighted he was available.
So here he is. Joining us from his home in Portland, Oregon, is award winning literary novelist Omar El Akkad.
ABOUT OMAR EL AKKADAuthor and journalist, he was born in Egypt, grew up in Qatar, moved to Canada as a teenager and now lives in the United States. He won a National Newspaper Award for Investigative Journalism and the Goff Penny Award for young journalists. His fiction and non-fiction writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Guardian, Le Monde, Guernica, GQ and others. His debut novel, American War, is an international bestseller, winning several awards. It was listed as one of the best books of the year by The New York Times and others. His new novel, What Strange Paradise, was released in July, 2021 and won the Giller Prize, the Pacific Northwest Booksellers’ Award, the Oregon Book Award for fiction, and was shortlisted for the Aspen Words Literary Prize. It was also named a best book of the year by the New York Times, the Washington Post, NPR and several other publications.
Buy What Strange Paradise here: https://amzn.to/3b0YLiL
WHAT'S THAT WORD?!
Co-host Pranati "Pea" Madhav joins Ramjee Chandran in the segment "What's That Word?", where they discuss the phrase "toe the line".
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Recently Indian author, Geetanjali Shree's book Tomb Of Sand, won the Rest Of The World version of the Booker Prize.
In literary circles—as indeed with other circles—awards and prizes always set off ripples of envy and carping. The cynical argument is that prizes are geared to triggering interest in markets—in this case, I presume, to sell more books. I haven’t done a deep dive into this but it makes for great coffee shop mulch.
So, whether by honest practice or by greasy marketing, a Booker win means much to the industry and in the case of Tomb Of Sand I dare say, it will trigger the gold rush of translations.
So are translations the next big thing?
My guest today, Kalyan Raman is no translation newbie. He has translated the works of some of the best known writers from Tamil into English. I have known him for many years. He is a scientist with a literary side. He worked in the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) as a satellite communications engineer.
His first substantive published translation of a book was one of short stories by the famous late Tamil modernist author, Ashokamitran.
I remember meeting Kalyan in Koshy’s Cafe in Bangalore the day that book was released. I walked over to a bookstore nearby and bought it. And I was introduced to the wonderful world of translated texts.
Translations are not something to be discussed blithely. There is so much that translators must know before they can translate. They must know the language, the history of the author, indeed the mind of the author, the subject. And then the translation itself must stay faithful to the rhythm, cadence and comportment of the text.
And importantly, stay faithful to the author. The translator must not conclude that the author’s prose could use a little improvement.
I’ve held Kalyan in very high estimation all these years and I am fortunate to have him here as my guest today. Today we ask him all about translations.
ABOUT KALYAN RAMANA graduate of IIT Madras and IIM Kolkata, N Kalyan Raman worked in telecommunications for over three decades. His career as a translator of contemporary Tamil fiction and poetry began in the early 90s. He has published fifteen works of Tamil fiction in translation, including those by major authors like Ashokamitran, Poomani, Perumal Murugan, Devibharathi, Salma and Vaasanthi. His translation of Tamil poetry has been published widely in important journals and anthologies in India and abroad. Breaking Free, his translation of a Tamil novel by Vaasanthi, was published in June this year by HarperCollins India. His translation of Perumal Murugan's Poonachi: The Story of a Black Goat was shortlisted for the inaugural JCB Prize in 2018. Its US edition, The Story of a Goat was nominated for the National Book Foundation Award 2020 for Translated Literature. In 2018, he was given the prestigious Pudumaipithan Memorial Award for his contribution to the cause of Tamil literature through his translations. He lives and works in Chennai.
Buy Breaking Free here: https://amzn.to/3yx288E
WHAT'S THAT WORD?!
Co-host Pranati "Pea" Madhav joins Ramjee Chandran in the segment "What's That Word?", where they discuss the business of translations and the phrase "champing at the bit".
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In one of his dispatches from the front lines, in North Africa during WW2, Ernest Hemingway wrote this about Italian soldiers. When these soldiers were slightly injured, they would proclaim loudly, swearing undying loyalty to Il Duce—Mussolini. But when they were mortally wounded and lay dying on the battlefield, they would forget all about Mussolini. Instead, they would invoke their mothers. “Mamma mia,” they said softly, of their fate.
In one of many vivid descriptions in Vaasanthi’s book, Cut-outs, Caste and Cine Stars—a book about a recent period in Tamil Nadu politics—she describes a parade that honored the chief minister and matinee idol, MG Ramachandran. One float in particular, was pulled by an MGR fan, with ropes attached by hooks to the man’s bare and bleeding back.
But that was an exception, Vaasanthi said. She wrote, and I quote, "But on the whole MGR fans prefer to flatter than to suffer."
Vaasanthi’s prose is replete with such observations.
Vaasanthi found her muse of creative expression principally through the voices of women.
Not all of them are sad tales of woe. One of her subjects is the fascinating actor and bad ass politician Jayalalithaa, who overcame the worst odds as a woman in the face of extreme and often physical misogyny of TN politics, to become something of the queen of Tamil Nadu, from the very political platform that rejected such notions of hierarchal superiority, leave alone royalty.
Vaasanthi’s prose is the happy result of creative writing meeting disciplined journalism.
She is bilingual in a real sense. Her English language prose by which she has authored several books is as real as her deep literary skills in Tamil. Her translators and journalist friends have told me as much.
In my list, Vaasanthi ranks among the best writers there are. Naturally, I am honored to invite her to The Literary City.
ABOUT VAASANTHIShe is a renowned author and journalist who writes in English and Tamil. Over forty years she published thirty novels, six short-story collections and four travelogues. Her books in English include Cut-outs, Caste and Cine Stars: The World of Tamil Politics, Amma: Jayalalithaa's Journey from Movie Star to Political Queen, The Lone Empress: A Portrait of Jayalalithaa, Karunanidhi: A Definitive Biography, and Rajinikanth: A Life. Her works in Tamil have been translated into Malayalam, Hindi, Telugu, Kannada, English, Norwegian, Czech and Dutch. Awards include Best Short Story Writer, Best Novel award for Ammani, Gyana Bharathi award, the UP Sahitya Sansthan award and the Punjab Sahitya Akademi. She was Editor, India Today (Tamil edition) for nearly ten years in Chennai. Now a freelance writer and journalist, she lives in Delhi.
Buy Breaking Free here: https://amzn.to/3yx288E
WHAT'S THAT WORD?!
Co-host Pranati "Pea" Madhav joins Ramjee Chandran in the segment "What's That Word?", where they discuss the origins of the letter P and the word "coterie".
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Most know who Charles Sobhraj is.
But even if he has become something of a legend, Sobhraj was—by many accounts—a thief and murderer after petty gains. And not an international crook engaged in high profile art and diamond heists. Nor an international arms dealer whose shenanigans get the collective underwear of nations in a twist.
Or was he?
My guest today—the renowned writer, Farrukh Dhondy—spent considerable time with Charles Sobhraj. Farrukh’s descriptions of those meetings resulted in his latest book, Hawk and Hyena. The book reveals aspects of Sobhraj’s life— that of an opportunist...a wannabe businessman. One of those guys we have all met—a person of indeterminate skill and dodgy provenance, never peddling the same thing twice.
Importantly, the book raises a startling and surprising question—did Charles Sobhraj hold the key to a potentially unpalatable truth—that maybe Sadaam Hussein did have weapons of mass destruction after all?
In a similar question, did the Government of India seek the assistance of Charles Sobhraj in getting the release of the hostages from the hijacked Air India plane in Kandahar in 1999?
Was Charles Sobhraj more than a small-time crook who seduced hippies and liberated them from life and lustrous diamond?
Hawk and Hyena by Farrukh Dhondy raises those questions and answers many.
This book is his latest offering in a fascinating life of journalism, TV shows, films, plays and books and political activism—he was a marxist member of the British Black Panthers. There’s a link to his Wikipedia page below.
Here’s another book I recommend, Fragments Against My Ruin: A Life—Farrukh Dhondy’s memoirs, or autobiography.
This book is a riot. From a humility that can only come from someone inherently funny, Farrukh Dhondy turns important incidents into escapades and wit into wackiness.
My own introduction to his writing was from columns he wrote—and writes—in various papers. He frequently opened with the line, “As an elder of the community I am often asked..." For many reasons, I found that line delightful.
Some years ago, a friend brought Farrukh to my office in an unplanned visit and neither of us can remember why. We had coffee. I was happy for this social surprise. But I had no idea what to say to him if only because I had too much to say to him and I had been blindsided.
Happily, that’s not the case today.
It is both honour and privilege to have Farrukh Dhondy join me from his home in London as my guest.
Buy Hawk & Hyena: https://amzn.to/3HRGNuR
Buy Fragments Against My Ruin: A Life: https://amzn.to/3HUuk9H
ABOUT FARRUKH DHONDY
Farrukh Dhondy is a British-Indian writer. Born in 1944 in Pune, he studied in Pune, Cambridge and Leicester Universities. He writes fiction, non-fiction, journalism, stage drama, TV and films.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Farrukh_Dhondy
WHAT'S THAT WORD?! - UNDIES IN A TWIST
Co-host Pranati "Pea" Madhav joins Ramjee Chandran in the segment "What's That Word?", where they discuss the origins of the phrase "Undies in a twist".
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The more experienced writers are aware that the hardest thing to do is to write without trying to be clever.
Some writers are born to coruscating prose. And then there are those who can entertain readers without having to use words like...coruscating.
My guest today—Chitra Divakaruni— is such a writer.
Reading Chitra is like traveling in a car with an excellent suspension—you don’t feel the potholes. Or maybe that’s because there are no potholes in her prose.
Her writing is not only honest, sincere and without artifice, but also vivid. So vivid that film makers seem to be falling about making movies out of everything she writes. The Mistress Of Spices—starring Dylan McDermott and Aishwarya Rai—is one famous example. Sister Of My Heart was turned into a TV show in Tamil called Anbulla Snegitheiye (Beloved Friend).
Her stories have been turned into movies, plays, even opera.
To say that Chitra Divakaruni’s prose is romantic or evocative is to fall to spewing platitudes.
What any writer, critic or serious reader of books needs to understand is that Chitra's consistently good writing comes from craft not from a random muse.
For that qualification, she is a professor at Houston University teaching creative writing.
Her most recent book The Last Queen is a historical account of Rani Jindan, wife of then Maharaja of Punjab, Ranjit Singh and mother of the next Maharaja, Dalip Singh. The book may be categorized as historical fiction but the fiction is in the gaps of the story. The historical account is rich and—I’ll say it—evocative.
And now it is my pleasure to present one of the best known Indian writers Chitra Divakaruni.
ABOUT CHITRA BANERJEE DIVAKARUNI
Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni is an award-winning author, poet, activist and teacher. She is the author of 20 books including Mistress of Spices, Sister of My Heart, Oleander Girl, Before We Visit the Goddess and Palace of Illusions. Her latest novels are The Forest of Enchantments, a feminist retelling of the epic The Ramayana in the voice of Sita, and The Last Queen, the story of Maharani Jindan, the indomitable queen regent of Punjab who fought the British in many ingenious ways. Divakaruni often writes about contemporary life in America and India, women’s experiences, immigration, history, magical realism and mythology.
Buy The Last Queen here: https://amzn.to/3QsthSh
WHAT'S THAT WORD?! - CATCH-22
Co-host Pranati "Pea" Madhav joins Ramjee Chandran in the segment "What's That Word?", where they discuss the the origins of the phrase "catch-22".
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A very interesting study at Hebrew University found that the brain inflates numbers under some circumstances. University psychologists called this a “diversity illusion”.
Israelis and American students were asked to assess the size of minorities—Arabs and African Americans—among them. In both cases, people believed there were far more people from the minority than there actually were.
Researchers concluded that this is due to the mind’s tendency to focus on and amplify that which is out of the ordinary.
In one experiment Jewish students estimated the percentage of Arabs in the student body at 31% and Arab students said, 35%. Only 12% of students were Arab.
A similar experiment with American participants about the number of African American faces in a grid of 100 photographs yielded similar results—40% against 25%.
To be sure they ran the tests again and again, same results. I ran this test at home with a European house guest—exactly the same result.
Psychologists concluded that such overestimation of minority numbers, results from innate intolerance.
Most reasonable people want to live in an equitable society. By and large most of them find themselves in the centre of a larger political equation. And that political equation includes the participation of those who are not a part of the majority of voters.
While people in the minority generally get a pretty good understanding of the majority, it is good civics, that the majority should get a better understanding of the people among us who are of a different persuasion.
The active verb in persuasion is to persuade. There are many forms of persuasion—from coaxing to coercion. And when gentle persuasion turns into political propaganda and jingoist rhetoric, the thinking of a good section of the polity is influenced enough to swing from the middle towards any one extreme. And soon people arrive at all manners of ugly consensus and illogical conclusion.
My guest today is Ghazala Wahab the author of a news-making book, Born A Muslim.
Reading some of the reviews of her book, I got the impression that many reviewers fell to assuming that Ghazala wrote her book to protest the growing sentiment being manufactured against the muslim minority. The interviews that I read or heard, seems to approach their subject with a premeditated woke-ness.
To be candid, I first approached the book the same way. I thought it would seek to educate non-muslims about the religion and practices of Islam with the underlying appeal for a more compassionate appreciation of an increasingly marginalized people. But reading the book set me straight.
Ghazala’s book takes the argument inwards…a muslim speaking to fellow muslims introspectively. It is written without any of the sentimental—and at times, even plaintive—hooks that so easily and so often define the texts of marginalized or dispossessed people.
And to add to that Ghazala is Editor of Force India, a magazine about national security, principally defence matters. And she co-authored the book, Dragon On Our Doorstep: Managing China Through Military Power.
After I read Born A Muslim, I couldn’t wait to speak to the author. So here she is.
ABOUT GHAZALA WAHAB
A journalist since 1994, Ghazala has authored Born a Muslim: Some Truths About Islam in India and co-authored Dragon on our Doorstep: Managing China Through Military Power with Pravin Sawhney, with whom she founded FORCE magazine.
Buy Born A Muslim here: https://amzn.to/3H1L92o
WHAT'S THAT WORD?! - COAXING
Co-host Pranati "Pea" Madhav joins Ramjee Chandran in the segment "What's That Word?", where they discuss the medieval origins of the word.
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Forty years ago, in 1982, two young men broke into the New Delhi home of an Indian Member of Parliament—and they held him and four others, hostage for several hours. The pistol packing hostage taker, Ram Narayan wanted to bring attention to the misfortunes of exploited coal miners in a nearby state.
Ram Narayan carried pamphlets of a manifesto he titled “Violence Is A Historical Necessity” and in it he underlined the Marxist-Leninist opinion that "No serious student of history will deny that certain historical situations render violence ineluctable."
It is commonly known that the poorest labourers in rural India are exploited. So exploited that in many cases they are, quite practically, slaves.
Sometimes a more sanitized expression is used for slavery—indentured labour. But that only suggests that the labourers work all their lives for free, usually for someone to whom they are indebted, typically because they have taken a loan that can never be reasonably repaid.
So, they end up working for subsistence. They cannot leave their work; any attempt to break free leaving them and their families in mortal danger. Being so low down the social pecking order, and often without education, they are without recourse to justice—whether social or legal.
Modern slavery is abhorrent and alien, for many of us. For some, it is an everyday reality.
A story about some enslaved quarry workers—in the North Indian state of Uttar Pradesh in India—came to light. By all reports, it was a heartwarming story of how these slaves won their freedom following a peaceful rebellion and set themselves up in their own town and named it Azad Nagar, or Freedom Ville.
But while researching this story for herself, my guest, Laura Murphy—a professor of human rights and contemporary slavery—uncovered a secret. The revolution was not as peaceful as various reports, books and documentaries had described, in rather romantic narratives.
It appeared that the slaves of Azad Nagar had won freedom through violence and murder.
The reason this book is important to read is because it confronts us with the proposition that Ram Narayan made several years before—in the matter of revolution, is violence a historical necessity?
Joining us from her home in New Orleans in the United States is Dr Laura Murphy, the author of Azad Nagar-The Story of a 21st-Century Slave Revolt.
About Laura Murphy
Laura T. Murphy is Professor of Human Rights and Contemporary Slavery at the Helena Kennedy Centre for International Justice at Sheffield Hallam University in the UK. She is the author of The New Slave Narrative: The Battle Over Representations of Contemporary Slavery, Survivors of Slavery: Modern-Day Slave Narratives, and Metaphor and the Slave Trade in Western African Literature. Her work has been funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities, the British Academy, and the National Humanities Center.
Buy Azad Nagar-The Story of a 21st-Century Slave Revolt: https://amzn.to/3x0loLa
WHAT'S THAT WORD?! - SCAPEGOAT
Co-host Pranati "Pea" Madhav joins Ramjee Chandran in the segment "What's That Word?", where they discuss the the origins of this biblical word.
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Join our Facebook group, Bangalore Literary Society. It does not matter if you are not in Bangalore. This group is for anyone interested in language and words.
My guest today is Scott Yanow—one of the best known and most prolific jazz reviewers.
Writing about jazz is special, because of the dynamic and fluid nature of the music. There is a basic melody in jazz…but only to begin with. The musicians, in their solos, interpret that melody and its underlying harmonic structure.
And always, and without exception, that interpretation is different every time a jazz soloist plays.
Here’s an analogy for jazz beginners.
Classical music, for instance, is like a play. The lines are written for the actors, who must use their skill to bring out the drama in the lines. But it’s always the same lines, the same words.
Jazz is like scintillating conversation. You don’t say the same thing twice—for the sake of your friends I hope you don’t. And how interesting you are depends on how much you know, and how well you say it.
So, you see what I mean when I say that writing jazz reviews merits its own skill.
Speaking of skill, Scott Yanow has authored 12 books, written over 20,000 recording reviews and over 900liner notes. (Liner notes are those descriptive passages that accompany an album.)
He has also written artist biographies and press releases for record labels, public relations firms and individual artists. And most easily accessible, he has written hundreds of summaries for jazzonthetube.com.
Scott doesn’t tire easily. And simply listening to him describe a typical day is enough to make most of us pine for a vacation.
As I said earlier, it’s all about how much you know and how well you say it. Scott Yanow knows a lot and says it in an unpretentious, direct and honest writing style.
And now he joins us from his home near Los Angeles.
ABOUT SCOTT YANOW
Scott Yanow was born in New York and grew up near Los Angeles. He became the jazz editor for Record Review, a now-legendary music magazine. Yanow has written forJazz Times, Cadence, Coda, The Mississippi Rag, Jazz Forum, Jazz News, The Jazz Report, Planet Jazz, Jazz Now, Jazz Improv and other significant jazz magazines. He contributors to seven magazines: Downbeat, Jazziz, the NYC Jazz Record, the Los Angeles Jazz Scene, Jazz Artistry Now, the Jazz Rag and Syncopated Times.
Yanow has written 12 books on jazz: The Jazz Singers, The Great Jazz Guitarists, Jazz On Film Duke Ellington, Swing, Bebop, Afro-Cuban Jazz, Classic Jazz, Trumpet Kings, Jazz: A Regional Exploration, the massive Jazz On Record 1917-76 and most recently Jazz Through The Eyes Of A Jazz Journalist (My Jazz Memoirs).Jazz Through The Eyes Of A Jazz Journalist: https://amzn.to/3PLnx5S
WHAT'S THAT WORD?! - JAZZ
Co-host Pranati "Pea" Madhav joins Ramjee Chandran in the segment "What's That Word?", where they discuss the the origins of "jazz" and tell jazz jokes.
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A few years ago, I went to a movie theatre in New York City’s Chelsea, a theatre that screens indie films, to watch this new movie, Victoria & Abdul. It is a story of how Abdul Karim, a servant to Victoria, who was then Queen of England, came to be her closest confidant. A touching tale.
After the movie, in the foyer, I overheard one woman asking her friend in a most puzzled tone, “Is that what the museum in London is called? Victoria and...Abdul?!” “No dear,” her friend replied and set her straight on the correct name, "it’s Victoria and Albert Museum, dear."
The title of the movie is based on the book of the same name by my guest today, author, journalist and most definitely, historian, Shrabani Basu.
Shrabani has the almost uncanny ability to find a story where others did not and spend years researching it. Such as the story about a Parsee lawyer in pre-WW1 England, George Edalji, who was accused of murdering horses.
Now, who among us has not lived in 221B Baker Street—the residence of Sherlock Holmes? In our hearts and minds. We know that Arthur Conan Doyle created Sherlock Holmes and wrote those magnificent mysteries. But there were two occasions when Conan Doyle could actually play Sherlock Holmes; that of Oscar Slater who was convicted of bludgeoning an 82-year-old woman. Doyle saw inconsistencies in the case and paid for most of the costs for Slater's successful appeal, 20 years later.
The other famous case was that of George Edalji. Conan Doyle got involved and despite the efforts of the local constabulary, had him exonerated…importantly, in public and historical opinion.
Shrabani Basu’s book, The Mystery Of The Parsee Lawyer, is a cannot-put-down thriller more so because it is a real life Sherlock Holmes thriller.
Back to the lovebirds, Victoria and Abdul and putting aside my pretenses of not being interested in muck rake and scuttlebutt, I want to know how close Victoria was to Abdul. How close really?
To that end, let’s ask the author, Shrabani Basu.
ABOUT SHRABANI BASU
Shrabani Basu is an author and a journalist. She was born in Kolkata and grew up in Dhaka, Kathmandu and Delhi. Her books include Victoria & Abdul: The Extraordinary True Story of the Queen's Closest Confidant, now a major motion picture, Spy Princess: The Life of Noor Inayat Khan and For King and Another Country: Indian Soldiers on the Western Front, 1914-18. In 2010, she set up the Noor Inayat Khan Memorial Trust and campaigned for a memorial for the Second World War heroine, which was unveiled by Princess Anne in London in November 2012.
The Mystery Of The Parsee Lawyer: https://amzn.to/3PDcJ9J
Victoria And Abdul: https://amzn.to/3GcByoN
WHAT'S THAT WORD?! - PANJANDRUM
Co-host Pranati "Pea" Madhav joins Ramjee Chandran in the segment "What's That Word?", where they discuss the the word "Panjandrum".
WANT TO BE ON THE SHOW?
If you have a word, expression or phrase you would like to know more about, we would love to have you join us live on the show. You can reach out to us by mail: theliterarycity@explocity.com or simply, tlc@explocity.com.
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If your word or phrase is selected, we will call you.
Join our Facebook group, Bangalore Literary Society. It does not matter if you are not in Bangalore. This group is for anyone interested in language and words.
My guest today is Pavan Varma. He is Vice President of the All India Trinamool Congress, a former member of Parliament, former Press Secretary to the President of India, and as a career diplomat, former Ambassador to Bhutan and Indian High Commissioner, Cyprus.
But above all, in my book, he is an author of substance. A historian, he has authored over a dozen books that are treatises in literature, philosophy, socio-political thought and commentary.
An early book of his was The Great Indian Middle Class, a book that influenced my thinking substantially.
Two of his recent books are candidates for any thinking person’s bookshelf—one about the great Indian sage, Adi Shankaracharya and the other, The Great Hindu Civilisation: Achievement, Neglect, Bias and the Way Forward. I say thinking person’s bookshelf because the books enable anyone interested in exploring the Hindu philosophical premise or their Hindu identity and do it without submitting to gonzo politics and mindless jingoism.
His novel—When Loss is Gain—is a deeply introspective tale of a man coming to grips with a surprising turn in his life.
Writing fiction liberates the writer and it provides a window to the writer’s soul. The prose of fiction tends to yank off any protective veil and lets you look at a writer’s more romantic comportment.
So I was very happy to be told that he was going to be my next guest on my podcast. With that it is both my privilege and a pleasure to welcome Pavan K Varma to The Literary City.
ABOUT PAVAN VARMA
Pavan K. Varma was conferred Bhutan’s highest civilian award, the Druk Thuksey, by the King of Bhutan. He also received a honorary doctoral degree for his contribution to the fields of diplomacy, literature, culture and aesthetics by the University of Indianapolis in 2005 and an Honorary Doctorate by Sri Sharada Institute of Indian Management for his book "Adi Shankaracharya: Hinduism’s Greatest Thinker".
This book has also won the Atta Galatta-Bengaluru Literature Festival prize for the Best Book of Non-Fiction in 2018. And he won the Kalinga International Literary Award 2019. He is a popular columnist and a well known TV commentator.
Buy Yudhishtar & Draupadi: https://amzn.to/3whTET0
Buy The Great Indian Middle Class: https://amzn.to/3wBPjcu
WHAT'S THAT WORD?! - NEW WINE IN AN OLD BOTTLE
Co-host Pranati "Pea" Madhav joins Ramjee Chandran in the segment "What's That Word?", where they discuss the the words "New wine in an old bottle".
WANT TO BE ON THE SHOW?
If you have a word, expression or phrase you would like to know more about, we would love to have you join us live on the show. You can reach out to us by mail: theliterarycity@explocity.com or simply, tlc@explocity.com.
Or, you can visit: https://www.facebook.com/groups/bangaloreliterarysociety.
Or you can go to our Instagram page https://www.instagram.com/explocityblr/.
If your word or phrase is selected, we will call you.
Join our Facebook group, Bangalore Literary Society. It does not matter if you are not in Bangalore. This group is for anyone interested in language and words.
In the late 80s, the Indian voice in English literature started to be heard in a meaningful way.
But in the early days, the writing was criticized as being imitative of colonial English, swollen and bloated, and not keeping up with contemporary usage.
Either that, or it swung the other way to bring a self-referential rebellion against colonialism with cringe-worthy caricatures of Indian English. While this Quixotic legacy—of grammar, structure and the idiom being the casualty of a war without an enemy—hasn’t entirely left us.
But as a wise man never ever said, through this fustian thicket Indian voices peeped. New authors threw away the sola topee, and started to write in English, the narrative being Indian; with neither apology nor explanation for parlance.
My guest today, Poile Sengupta is one of the first such writers. From her debut in the mid-80s, she has widely and well…written prose, poetry and plays.
While Poile is both respected and reputable, I believe she has not received all the accolade she deserves…for her prose, poetry, being a playwright and above all, for being a pathfinder…kicking the doors open…for younger Indian writers to walk into a better future.
Let’s talk to Poile now and deep dive into her relationship with the English language.
ABOUT POILE SENGUPTA
Poile Sengupta is a playwright, poet, novelist and writer for children and adults. Her full length plays include Mangalam (1993), Inner Laws (1994), A Pretty Business (1995), Keats was a Tuber (1996), Collages (1998), Alipha and Thus Spake Shoorpanakha, So Said Shakuni (2001) and Samara’s Song (2007). Her plays have been performed and read across India and also abroad.
Her earlier books include The Exquisite Balance, The Way to My Friend’s House, Story of the Road, How the Path Grew - all from CBT, and Waterflowers by Scholastic. Her later work includes Role Call and Role Call Again, 2003, by Rupa and Co., Vikram and Vetal, 2005, Good Heavens!, 2006 and Vikramaditya’s Throne, 2007, from Puffin. Role Call has been translated and published in Bhasa Indonesia, while Vikram and Vetal has been translated and published in French. A picture book Four by Tulika, came out in 2018, and a chapter book A Time for Ebby, was published in September 2021, by Minmini Reads, an imprint of Karadi Tales, Chennai.
Poile Sengupta’s first novel for grown-ups, Inga was published in 2014 by Westland.
Link to buy A Time For Ebby: https://amzn.to/3FtDFnS
WHAT'S THAT WORD?! - HUSBAND
Co-host Pranati "Pea" Madhav joins Ramjee Chandran in the segment "What's That Word?", where they discuss the the words "husband and husbandry".
WANT TO BE ON THE SHOW?
If you have a word, expression or phrase you would like to know more about, we would love to have you join us live on the show. You can reach out to us by mail: theliterarycity@explocity.com or simply, tlc@explocity.com.
Or, you can visit: https://www.facebook.com/groups/bangaloreliterarysociety.
Or you can go to our Instagram page https://www.instagram.com/explocityblr/.
If your word or phrase is selected, we will call you.
Join our Facebook group, Bangalore Literary Society. It does not matter if you are not in Bangalore. This group is for anyone interested in language and words.
There is no easy definition of spirituality.
There certainly is no dictionary definition of it.
So I decided to make sport of finding how different people defined spirituality. But every explanation I found was merely another shade of grey. No one really could honestly define it.
I suspect that spirituality should be seen, not as a word but rather, as something that ranges from the metaphysical to the paranormal.
But my guest today, Arundhathi Subramaniam, has embarked on a more difficult mission—writing about it.
As a poet and a writer of succinct prose, she offers us a window into her lasting—and perhaps growing—sense of spirituality.
Her ability to write on this undefinable subject is an impressive skill. A skill that enables her to corral the many wayward strands of spirituality into something we can all understand—introspection.
In this episode I also dive into something else that defies me. What’s poetry?
Arundhathi Subramaniam recites three of her poems in this episode.
ABOUT ARUNDHATHI SUBRAMANIAM
Described as "one of the finest poets writing in India today" (The Hindu, 2010) Arundhathi Subramaniam is the award-winning author of thirteen books of poetry and prose. Her most recent volume of poems, Love Without a Story was described as "a breathtaking and heartwarming book" (Poetry Book Society Bulletin), "a unique poet of our times...in a league all by herself" (Indian Literature).
Widely translated and anthologised, her book, When God is a Traveller, was shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize and won the Sahitya Akademi Award 2020.
She is the recipient of various awards and fellowships, including the inaugural Khushwant Singh Prize, the Raza Award for Poetry, the Zee Women’s Award for Literature, the International Piero Bigongiari Prize in Italy, the Zee Indian Women Award for Literature, the Mystic Kalinga award, among others. She has written extensively on culture and spirituality, and has worked over the years as poetry editor, cultural curator and critic.
As prose writer, her books include the book of essays, Women Who Wear Only Themselves, the bestselling biography of a contemporary mystic.
Link to Arundhathi Subramaniam on Amazon: https://amzn.to/38LNLEt
WHAT'S THAT WORD?! - PORTMANTEAU
Co-host Pranati "Pea" Madhav joins Ramjee Chandran in the segment "What's That Word?", where they discuss the the word "portmanteau" and its Humpty Dumpty origins.
WANT TO BE ON THE SHOW?
If you have a word, expression or phrase you would like to know more about, we would love to have you join us live on the show. You can reach out to us by mail: theliterarycity@explocity.com or simply, tlc@explocity.com.
Or, you can visit: https://www.facebook.com/groups/bangaloreliterarysociety.
Or you can go to our Instagram page https://www.instagram.com/explocityblr/.
If your word or phrase is selected, we will call you.
Join our Facebook group, Bangalore Literary Society. It does not matter if you are not in Bangalore. This group is for anyone interested in language and words.
Cover pic of Arundhati Subramaniam: Meetesh Taneja
I will admit that until I had read William Dalrymple, I knew little of the history of Delhi, which is inextricable from the history of India.
Although I lived in New Delhi for eight years, all I ever knew about the history of India—my country—was what was taught to me by middle school history teachers. They regurgitated dry passages from textbooks.
There was no romance in the way we were taught history.
So when I lived in Delhi—right in the heart of visible history with crumbling moments and all—I couldn’t get past those apathetic and uncurious history text books.
And then I left Delhi to move to Bangalore.
And then Dalrymple happened. In the decades that he unravelled Delhi for me, it morphed from a city that I only knew as too expensive for my modest salary, to a city that hell, had djinns in it. Djinns with a D.
The more I listened to William Dalrymple as I interviewed him today, the more I appreciated his sentient feel for history. A feeling that makes humans out of historical personalities.
For this reason probably, when I first read City of Djinns, I will confess to an inexplicable sense of envy—as if I should and could have written that book…an “I wish I had said that” feeling.
But I had no such flights of fancy reading everything else he has written, most recently, Anarchy, an account of the East India Company and what happens when there is no separation between…er…merch and state.
Dalrymple’s prose is compelling and direct and that makes his books that much more engaging.
Let’s find out what else makes him one of the most respected writers of the history of India and the entire region of its historical influence.
So it is my privilege to welcome William Dalrymple to The Literary City.
REFERENCES:
William Dalrymple: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Dalrymple_(historian)
Bruce Chatwin: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bruce_Chatwin
Buy The Company Quartet: https://amzn.to/3K2Z7AV
Buy William Dalrymple (all books): https://amzn.to/3Owfbyo
Buy Hobson Jobson: https://amzn.to/3rHupa7
Buy In Patagonia: https://amzn.to/3KcEkL4
Shengdu: Xanadu
"Gone to Shengdu": This is to paraphrase the note that Bruce Chatwin allegedly left for his boss that read, "Gone to Patagonia".
WHAT'S THAT WORD?! - HOBSON JOBSON
Co-host Pranati "Pea" Madhav joins Ramjee Chandran in the segment "What's That Word?", where they discuss the the book Hobson-Jobson and how it came to be.
WANT TO BE ON THE SHOW?
If you have a word, expression or phrase you would like to know more about, we would love to have you join us live on the show. You can reach out to us by mail: theliterarycity@explocity.com or simply, tlc@explocity.com.
Or, you can visit: https://www.facebook.com/groups/bangaloreliterarysociety.
Or you can go to our Instagram page https://www.instagram.com/explocityblr/.
If your word or phrase is selected, we will call you.
Join our Facebook group, Bangalore Literary Society. It does not matter if you are not in Bangalore. This group is for anyone interested in language and words.
Almost every famous author—Hemingway, Virginia Woolf, Toni Morrison, Marquez and many before and after them—has written memorable short stories.
The short story has long been celebrated as an important part of literature, and in my view any effort to defend it as such is unnecessary.
My guest today is Indira Chandrasekhar—a writer of short stories. She is also a scientist and the editor of Out Of Print, a literary magazine.
I have known Indira for many years. We were in college in Bangalore, at about the same time. But the similarity ends there.
Indira made something of college. She went on to a doctorate in science and became a bio-physicist, like Jagdish Chandra Bose or James Watson.
But evidently, she likes what I do, more.
So she quit messing with membranes and macromolecules and about 12 years ago, she started a literary magazine called Out Of Print.
Out Of Print is published once in three months, online. Each issue carries fewer than 10 short stories, with a focus on writing from the Indian sub-continent.
Carefully curated, every one of the short stories in each issue is a tribute to craft, skill and style.
A 10th anniversary anthology of Out Of Print is available in bookstores and was a delight to sink into. As was her book of short stories, Polymorphism—that passage you heard in the beginning was Indira reading from this book.
To discuss science, literature and the polymath nature of old Bangalore, it is my pleasure to introduce my friend, Indira Chandrasekhar, to The Literary City With Ramjee Chandran.
ABOUT INDIRA CHANDRASEKHAR
Dr. Indira Chandrasekhar is a scientist, a writer, a literary curator and the founder and principal editor of Out of Print, one of the primary platforms for short fiction bearing a connection to the South Asian subcontinent.
Indira’s short stories have won awards and appeared in literary journals published in different parts of the world.
Her publications include, Out of Print : Ten Years – An Anthology of Stories (ed.), Context Books, the literary imprint of Westland Publishing, 2020; Polymorphism, HarperCollins, 2017; Pangea: An Anthology of Stories from Around the World (ed.), Thames River Publishing, 2012.
She serves on the councils of the Bangalore International Centre, the International Music and Arts Society Bangalore, the Kala Ghoda Arts Festival Mumbai and the G5A Foundation for Contemporary Culture Mumbai.
Out of Print: Ten Years : An Anthology of Stories: https://amzn.to/37vgqgx
Polymorphism: Stories: https://amzn.to/3xxvWmV
Out Of Print magazine: http://outofprintmagazine.co.in
WHAT'S THAT WORD?! - THE SHORT STORY
Co-host Pranati "Pea" Madhav joins Ramjee Chandran in the segment "What's That Word?", where they discuss the history of the short story, and present a trivia section of the shortest stories ever written, such as Hemingway's 6-word novel.
WANT TO BE ON THE SHOW?
If you have a word, expression or phrase you would like to know more about, we would love to have you join us live on the show. You can reach out to us by mail: theliterarycity@explocity.com or simply, tlc@explocity.com.
Or, you can visit: https://www.facebook.com/groups/bangaloreliterarysociety.
Or you can go to our Instagram page https://www.instagram.com/explocityblr/.
If your word or phrase is selected, we will call you.
Join our Facebook group, Bangalore Literary Society. It does not matter if you are not in Bangalore. This group is for anyone interested in language and words.
The reason I use the word fortuitous in the title of this episode of The Literary City is because Sanjoy K Roy, one of the founders of the Jaipur Literature Festival…let’s call it JLF, like everyone else…told me that its success was an accident.
Some say there are no accidents. You know, you dinged your dad’s car because you were careless…and not because the fates conspired to override your otherwise cautious and attentive demeanour.
Typically, people become successful because of their efforts—not despite them. Usually you will find that what we ascribe to luck included a great deal of knowledge, foresight and a gust of planning. As a wise man once ought to have said, the harder you work, the luckier you get yadda...yadda...
Now, JLF has editions all over the world, and—as a foot note to the flagship—its parent company Teamworks Arts handles several more events every year.
But Sanjoy Roy is my guest on The Literary City today because I want to establish that someone who turned what he calls an accident into the largest festival of literature in the world, is himself, by nature, literary.
There is one simple way to find out—and that’s to ask him.
And so, I am privileged to present today, someone who speaks for all of literature, Sanjoy Roy.
ABOUT SANJOY ROY
Sanjoy K Roy, an entrepreneur of the arts, is the Managing Director of Teamwork Arts, which produces over 33 highly acclaimed performing arts, visual arts and literary festivals in 40 cities across the world including the iconic annual Jaipur Literature Festival, international editions of JLF and the launched-during-lockdown digital JLF Brave New World series. He is a founder trustee of Salaam Baalak Trust, providing support services for street and working children in Delhi. He is also the founder Trustee of the Ishara Puppet Theatre Trust. Roy works closely with various industry bodies and the government on policy issues in the cultural sector in India, and has lectured and collaborated with leading international universities. He established Teamwork in 1989, a highly versatile production house with wide ranging interests in the performing and visual arts, social sector and films and television.
The upcoming bespoke edition of JLF—according to the publicity—will be a 10-day festival held from 13-22 May, 2022 and will celebrate the theme of SLOW LIFE including topics of food, art, wellness, fiction, climate change and environment. Elif Shafak and Huma Abedin are among the speakers. The location is the Soneva Fushi resort in the Maldives.
WHAT'S THAT WORD?! - "DIDACTIC".
Co-host Pranati "Pea" Madhav joins Ramjee Chandran in the segment "What's That Word?", where they discuss the etymology and pretentious nature of the word "didactic".
WANT TO BE ON THE SHOW?
If you have a word, expression or phrase you would like to know more about, we would love to have you join us live on the show. You can reach out to us by mail: theliterarycity@explocity.com or simply, tlc@explocity.com.
Or, you can visit: https://www.facebook.com/groups/bangaloreliterarysociety.
Or you can go to our Instagram page https://www.instagram.com/explocityblr/.
If your word or phrase is selected, we will call you.
Join our Facebook group, Bangalore Literary Society. It does not matter if you are not in Bangalore. This group is for anyone interested in language and words.
In old Bangalore, when you drove past the airport on the largely deserted road towards the suburb of Whitefield, was a farm, with trees and chickens and stuff that farms have.
It was owned by a couple whose voices were instantly recognizable as the principal voices of the English language stage in Bangalore—Arundhati and Jagdish Raja. Their farm was called Jagriti.
Today, the road is far from deserted and in the place of the farm, stands a theatre. A beautiful auditorium, in what should be described as a centre for all things cultural and literary.
The theatre retains the name of the old farm, Jagriti, but if there are any chickens there, I dare say, they aren’t running free on the range.
I call Arundhati and Jagdish Raja the Last Shakespeareans of Bangalore.
But now, who is a Shakespearean? Some people ask.
I mean who among us doesn’t know what ‘Platonic’ and ‘Aristotelian’ and ‘Einsteinean’ mean, but what's Shakespearean?
To me, anyone who has read a few plays of Shakespeare, has acted in a play even in school, bristles at the mention of Francis Bacon, and never finds the need to refer to him as the Bard of Avon, is a Shakespearean.
One wag described being Shakespearean as, "A modern sonnet with three quatrains and a punchy couplet."
Well, replace "punchy couplet" with "punchy couple" and it makes me proud to be able to present on my show, Bangalore’s last Shakespeareans.
ABOUT THE RAJAS
Arundhati RajaArundhati Raja, co-founded the Artistes’ Repertory Theatre in 1982. The company and its productions are now an integral part of Bangalore’s cultural history. While directing and acting, she also taught French, Biology and Drama for several years and considers her life as a teacher to be instrumental to her deep desire to encourage and support new talent. Arundhati Raja has now directed over 30 productions and continues to perform, teach and motivate a new generation of theatre makers.
Jagdish RajaJagdish was Principal of Pan Communications in London, England with clients in the UK, USA and Europe before returning to India with Arundhati, his wife, in 1972. He was an advertising consultant to companies and agencies and Advisor Communications at ActionAid.
Jagdish is a Graduate Member of the Communications Advertising & Marketing Society (M.CAM) London and an Associate of Trinity College London (ATCL). He is Founder Trustee of The ART Foundation, a registered Charitable Trust, which administers JAGRITI.
TO CONTRIBUTE TO OR GET IN TOUCH WITH JAGRITI
Start at their website jagrititheatre.com. Questions: communications@jagrititheatre.com. Social: Facebook and Instagram — [@jagrititheatre].
WHAT'S THAT WORD?! - "AMATEUR".
Co-host Pranati "Pea" Madhav joins Ramjee Chandran in the segment "What's That Word?", where they discuss the origins of the word, "amateur" and a limerick on love.
About two decades ago I offered Aakar Patel a job as editor of Explocity. And just when we were all set, the famous and reputable newspaper in Mumbai, Mid-Day, offered Aakar a job as Editor and…well, of course I understood. If he had not accepted that job I would have forced him to.
But you know what they say… when one editorial door closes and another…oh the hell with the analogies… I heard that Tushita Patel, Aakar’s partner, was leaving her job as Editor of The Asian Age. I called her and she hopped a flight to Bangalore and joined Explocity as Editor and totally killed.
Twenty years later, I am fortunate to count them both as friends. And not principally because they make fried fish with that mustard thang.
Now, anyone with even a peripheral interest in Indian politics ought to know Aakar Patel.
And even though newspapers around the country have recently developed new and deeper shades of funk by not continuing to publish Aakar’s anti-injustice polemic, he remains India’s most prolific columnist.
The context of Aakar's prose is serious, the tone often calling question to judgment, but you can sense a suppressed smile under every description.
Here’s an example of what I call the suppressed smile.
In a socio-political comment about the inability or at least, unwillingness of the Indian to be gracious in defeat, he uses cricket. In an article titled The Banality Of The Indian Cricket Fan he wrote and I quote, “It’s about nationalism, which in India is narrow and zero-sum. If they score even a little victory, a boundary, our tumescence droops.”
That writing is not magic realism—whatever manner of contrivance the phrase magic realism is—but maybe I’ll call this one… Cialis In Wonderland...?
The reason humour lurks beneath even the most serious of Aakar’s writing is because he sees the foibles of the hoi polloi as absurd theatre.
In a recent event promoting the launch of his latest book, The Price Of The Modi Years, someone in the audience asked him if saw hope in the political scenario in India, when viewed from the depressed side of the divide.
“Yes,” he replied, “but maybe it will take a couple of election cycles.”
“Thank you, Aakar!” The audience member cried irrationally, “thank you for saying there’s hope!!!”
I smiled and tried to catch Aakar’s eye but I could tell that he was busy trying to figure out how not to become a prophet—although in India pundit and prophet somehow become synonymous.
Today Aakar is my guest as neither prophet nor rationalist, but as a writer and I got to ask him a bunch of questions about what makes him, above all, one of the country’s most compelling writers.
ABOUT AAKAR PATEL
Aakar Patel is a syndicated columnist who has edited English and Gujarati newspapers. His books include 'Why I Write', a translation of Saadat Hasan Manto’s Urdu non-fiction (Tranquebar, 2014), 'Our Hindu Rashtra: What It Is. How We Got Here', a study of majoritarianism in India and Pakistan (Westland, 2020), 'Price of the Modi Years', a history of India after 2014 (Westland, 2021) and 'The Anarchist Cookbook', a guide on why and how to protest (HarperCollins, 2022). He is Chair of Amnesty International India.
Buy The Price Of The Modi Years here: https://amzn.to/3DiXsVU
WHAT'S THAT WORD?! - "HOI POLLOI".
Co-host Pranati "Pea" Madhav joins Ramjee Chandran in the segment "What's That Word?", where they discuss the origins of the phrase hoi polloi with asides on cunning linguists.
Even a mildly curious glance at any of the millions of communities of migrant people the world over will yield something interesting.
The Goans of India, are one such. They are a fun and likeable lot as far as most of us can tell. We know them by their state, Goa—a dream vacation destination for many—and their seeming love of life, which is synonymous with a state of bliss—they even have a word for that.
And don’t get me started on their feni. I fondly remember commencing my descent into bottles of Goa’s finest but, for some reason, not what happened after.
Those were my happy drinking days. I haven’t touched a drop to drink for over 20 years now as I stew, in abstemious contemplation of my navel.
Goans have been an adventurous people. Sea-faring and peripatetic, while they migrated to every continent, mainly in search of better livelihoods.
All tales of migrant people always have some surprises.
A Goan becoming an accountant in Muscat, Oman might not be much of a story. But how a musician, a Mr de Souza, came to be the bandleader of the Sultan’s band in Zanzibar is a matter of lasting curiosity.
My guest today is she who tells such tales. Selma Carvalho—a Goan who grew up in Dubai and now lives in London. By all evidence, not only is she the most visible chronicler of Goan migrants, but also the most compelling. Selma’s record of this history is as entertaining as it is scholarly.
I started by researching her for this podcast. Very quickly, I disappeared into its maw of her prose to its—I use her rather digestive word—centripetal location.
After much non-fiction, her debut novel Sisterhood Of Swans is available everywhere.
And now I am privileged to be the one of many to bring this witty and incisive scholar to you. Selma Carvalho.
ABOUT SELMA CARVALHO
Carvalho is a British-Asian writer whose work explores themes of migration, memory and belonging. She is the author of three non-fiction books documenting the Goan presence in colonial East Africa. She led the Oral Histories of British-Goans Project (2011-2014) funded by the UK Heritage Lottery Fund. Her short fiction, in English and in Portuguese translation, has been published in journals like Litro and Lighthouse and anthologies published by Comma Press and Kingston University Press. She is also the editor of two volumes of The Brave New World of Goan Writing & Art (2018 and 2020). Her work has been shortlisted for several literary prizes, notably the London Short Story Prize, the Dinesh Allirajah Prize and the New Asian Writing Prize. She is the winner of the Leicester Writes Prize 2018 and her collection of short stories was a finalist for the prestigious SI Leeds Literary Prize 2018. Sisterhood of Swans is her debut novel and was shortlisted for the Mslexia Novella Prize 2018 in the UK. Selma lives in London.
Here are links to a selection of Carvalho's articles:
https://www.heraldgoa.in/Edit/Opinions/Inquisition-horror-or-error/162157
https://thebombayreview.com/our-american-guest-selma-carvalho/
https://www.joaoroqueliteraryjournal.com/nonfiction-1/2017/10/7/of-crioulos-and-poskim
https://www.joaoroqueliteraryjournal.com/nonfiction-1/2022/3/4/zanzibars-goan-bandsmen
Buy Sisterhood Of Swans: https://amzn.to/3udmp0U
WHAT'S THAT WORD?! - "CONTEMPLATING YOUR NAVEL".
Co-host Pranati "Pea" Madhav joins Ramjee Chandran in the segment "What's That Word?", to find the meaning of many words. But they finalise on discussing the phrase "contemplating your navel."
The most difficult prose to write is the prose that is easiest to read.
Writing on weighty matters is easy, if you are well-informed on those weighty matters.
But any honest writer will admit—in a cloud of envy laced with a silver lining of admiration—that supermarket paperbacks such as whodunits and stories for kids are exceptionally difficult to write.
Even more difficult are potboiler romances.
My guest today is Milan Vohra—a writer, to be admired for this reason.
About 10 years ago, she was the author of the first Mills & Boon romance to be authored by an Indian. This was no easy achievement.
For years, Mills & Boon has had its principally female-readership in its thrall. Several women have described these romances as a rite of passage sort of thing. It starts around the coming of age. And does not stop.
Of course, curious men have immersed themselves discreetly in these romantic novels…and sadly, learned nothing.
Milan’s writing is not fluffy and sugary. Her writing often pulls to the darker side of emotions and her novels lurk in the murky junction of sex, infatuation and other human emotion.
When you add her quick and underlying humour, the mix is something which regular humans understand.
Now that I have laid bare her soul, let’s meet the person.
Milan Vohra has written five books, ‘The Love Asana’ (with Harlequin,2010), which made her the first Indian Mills & Boon author, ‘Tick-tock we’re 30’, (with Westland 2013, and soon to be seen on the screen), ‘Our Song’ (with HarperCollins, 2019). ‘Head over heels’ and ‘Mates, Dates & Double Takes’ a collection of contemporary short stories about first love (2021). Milan is also a TEDx speaker, a short story writer and an award winning advertising professional.
WHAT'S THAT WORD?! - CARPE DIEM
Co-host Pranati "Pea" Madhav joins Ramjee Chandran in the segment titled "What's That Word?"—or maybe Ramjee forgets to mention its title—to discuss the phrase, its meaning, and of course, its etymology. A delightfully funny segment.
If you have a word or phrase you would like to explore, join us live on the show. Reach us by mail: theliterarycity@explocity.com or simply, tlc@explocity.com.
Or, Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/groups/bangaloreliterarysociety
Or Instagram https://www.instagram.com/explocityblr/
If your word or phrase is selected, we'll call you.
Join our Facebook group, Bangalore Literary Society. It does not matter if you are not in Bangalore. This group is for anyone interested in language and words.
HELP EDUCATE A NEEDY CHILD
The Literary City encourages you to give to those children who struggle to get an education. We ask you to contribute whatever you can to The Association of People with Disability. The link to donate is: https://www.apd-india.org/donations. Visit their site and take a look at the wonderful work they do and find it in your heart to, well, teach a child to fish.
The largely unspoken reason why so many people believe good grammar is a thing to diss, is because speaking English well is associated with privilege—the better you speak it, the more likely from privilege you must be.
Shaw's Pygmalion was vitally devoted to illustrating class distinctions by language; My Fair Lady, its pithy, entertaining adaptation.
To excuse the incorrect use of grammar, some others say that language is a mutable thing and the rules of grammar should, and did, change with time. If this were true, it would not explain why there is zero tolerance for bad grammar and syntax in writing and reportage in most languages other than English.
Politics—and excuses for one's shoddiness aside—there is the celebration of expression.
Literary writing uses nuance and the subtlety of words and phrases to celebrate thoughts and ideas. In the culinary analogy, literary writers might choose one word over another for a soupçon of meaning—in the same way that a good chef might use a brief hint of thyme, to delight the diner with a discerning palate.
You might accuse my guest Suresh Menon of a discerning literary palate.
He is a well-known cricket writer. Not only in India but anywhere. I know this to be true. I checked.
His newly-minted book is Why Don’t You Write Something I Might Read, the title of which, he explained, is because his wife—presumably fatigued by his volumes on cricket—asked him that question.
It probably caused Suresh to skip a beat… because his book is subtitled, Reading, Writing and… Arrhythmia.
Suresh Menon points out that the world has seen a number of literary writers writing on their favourite sport: Vladimir Nabokov on chess, Joyce Carol Oates on boxing, John Updike on golf and Ramachandra Guha on cricket.
But Suresh drove opposite to rush hour traffic. He is a sportswriter who wrote a book on literature.
His delightful book is available everywhere that books are available and it is the sort of book that makes you want to meet the author.
So dive into this episode and allow me introduce you to the author, Suresh Menon.
You can buy the book here: https://amzn.to/3I7ZB7X
WHAT'S THAT WORD?! - TO THE MANNER BORN.
...or is it "TO THE MANOR BORN?"
Co-host Pranati "Pea" Madhav joins Ramjee Chandran in the segment titled "What's That Word?"—or maybe Ramjee forgets to mention its title—to discuss the phrase, its meaning, and of course, its etymology. A delightfully funny segment.
If you have a word or phrase you would like to explore, join us live on the show. Reach us by mail: theliterarycity@explocity.com or simply, tlc@explocity.com.
Or, Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/groups/bangaloreliterarysociety
Or Instagram https://www.instagram.com/explocityblr/
If your word or phrase is selected, we'll call you.
Join our Facebook group, Bangalore Literary Society. It does not matter if you are not in Bangalore. This group is for anyone interested in language and words.
HELP EDUCATE A NEEDY CHILD
The Literary City encourages you to give to those children who struggle to get an education. We ask you to contribute whatever you can to The Association of People with Disability. The link to donate is: https://www.apd-india.org/donations. Visit their site and take a look at the wonderful work they do and find it in your heart to, well, teach a child to fish.
In this episode we spend quite a bit of time examining the comma.
This, the smallest of literary squiggles, is also the most important of all squiggles.
Not using a comma correctly could have serious implications - it could change the meaning of a sentence. It's one thing when that happens in daily life. Quite another in courts; a misplaced or missing comma could have serious legal implications.
In 2006, a dispute in Canada over a comma in a 14 page long contract in a telecom case resulted in a cost of 1 million Canadian dollars.
In another case, in the state of Maine in the United States, delivery drivers of the Oakhurst Dairy, were in a legal spat with their employers for overtime. The U.S. Court of Appeals determined that Maine’s overtime law was grammatically ambiguous, and for that reason, the drivers won the appeal.
The offending sentence was this: "The canning, processing, preserving, freezing, drying, marketing, storing, packing for shipment or distribution of: <...their products>"
The rules of the Oxford Comma—which Pea and I discuss at length in our segment "WHAT'S THAT WORD?!"—state that there should be a comma even before the last item on a list—even with the presence of "and".
By this rule, the sentence should have sported a comma between “shipment” and “or”. Such as this: "...packing for shipment, comma, or distribution"
Therefore, the court ruled that the absence of the comma meant the phrase “packing for shipment or distribution” was one action.
So, grammar is important in law.
And if lawyers must be grammatical, then there is a good chance that some of them will be literary. (For the same reason I suppose that many architects are also good designers.)
And proof of that is my guest today, Aditya Sondhi. A senior advocate with a Masters in Political Science and he a PhD, by a thesis on the army and democracy.
He is an author of two books, published by Penguin, and he has written two one-act plays—one of which was shortlisted for a prestigious award. Sondhi was also the winner of the Deccan Herald (a Bangalore-based newspaper) short story contest.
Who better than he with whom to discuss good grammar?
WHAT'S THAT WORD?! - THE OXFORD COMMA.
Co-host Pranati "Pea" Madhav joins Ramjee Chandran in the segment titled "What's That Word?"—or titled in whichever way Ramjee mangles the title—to discover the origins of the most important of squiggles, the humble comma.
If you have a word or phrase you would like to explore, join us live on the show. Reach us by mail: theliterarycity@explocity.com or simply, tlc@explocity.com.
Or, Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/groups/bangaloreliterarysociety
Or Instagram https://www.instagram.com/explocityblr/
If your word or phrase is selected, we'll call you.
Join our Facebook group, Bangalore Literary Society. It does not matter if you are not in Bangalore. This group is for anyone interested in language and words.
HELP EDUCATE A NEEDY CHILD
The Literary City encourages you to give to those children who struggle to get an education. We ask you to contribute whatever you can to The Association of People with Disability. The link to donate is: https://www.apd-india.org/donations. Visit their site and take a look at the wonderful work they do and find it in your heart to, well, teach a child to fish.
We pause in our interviews and other segments in this episode, to pay tribute to a brilliant mind of our times—writer, satirist and brilliant wit, PJ O'Rourke.
In this episode, Ramjee Chandran talks about how PJ O'Rourke influenced his writing more than any other literary figure has. And rues that he missed the opportunity to meet and interview him.
There would be no need to explain why anyone would emulate PJ O'Rourke—man, author and analyst.
From being a gonzo journalist in National Lampoon, the wackiest publication of all time (it even out-wacky'd MAD magazine) to becoming a respected political analyst, O'Rourke's career took interesting turns.
Only the most capable among us would be able to fashion a life and earn a living from what we want to do, and not what we have to do.
Only O'Rourke's unusual approach to analytical reportage and his extremely popular wit, could have given him the leeway to get editor to allow him—and fund him—to do the stories he wanted to do. This included travelling to terrible places in which to live, or even visit. To give you a sense of what that means, a present day sequel to Holidays In Hell would have included Aleppo in Syria.
A committed conservative, he was apologetic for much his hippie years and became a believer in free market economics. His conservative side seemed more about the economy than about politics, and to prove it, O'Rourke savaged both sides of the aisle equally.
In his book, "Don't Vote, It Only Encourages The Bastards", he made the case that to vote for a politician is to provide that individual with your licence to do whatever it is they do.
PJ O'Rourke died from lung cancer. He leaves behind a rich legacy—of descriptions of a time in which we currently live.
The audio passages of O'Rourke are from him reading from the introduction to his book, "A Cry From The Far Middle - Despatches From A Divided Land" (Grove Atlantic). The extract is from a YouTube video, accessible here.
You can buy the book here. Or wherever you buy books, of course.
In this episode we have. not included the popular segment, WHAT'S THAT WORD?! but if you have a word or phrase you would like to explore, join us live on the show. Reach us by mail: theliterarycity@explocity.com or simply, tlc@explocity.com.
Or, Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/groups/bangaloreliterarysociety
Or Instagram https://www.instagram.com/explocityblr/
If your word or phrase is selected, we'll call you.
Join our Facebook group, Bangalore Literary Society. It does not matter if you are not in Bangalore. This group is for anyone interested in language and words.
HELP EDUCATE A NEEDY CHILD
The Literary City encourages you to give to those children who struggle to get an education. We ask you to contribute whatever you can to The Association of People with Disability. The link to donate is: https://www.apd-india.org/donations. Visit their site and take a look at the wonderful work they do and find it in your heart to, well, teach a child to fish.
The most enduring mnemonic of theatre is the twin masks of happy and sad. Comedy is Yin to Tragedy’s Yang. The most enduring vision of the Side B of a comedian’s personality is the sad mask. We have all heard the stories; we all wear those twin masks every day.
When we are all done with the predictable platitudes of lemons and lemonades, we are all in the realpolitik. But women have additional battles to fight in this realpolitik.
And when you are an entertainer, your workplace is the stage under a spotlight, a barely attentive and unforgiving audience are your workplace colleagues, and your battles are more real; where acclaim and criticism mix with misogyny and you can't tell one from another.
But my guest today, actor-comedian Rubi Chakravarti, wants none of this sad sack business. Rubi’s funny side seems to have emerged from a happy place. Either that or she has made whatever she had into a happy place.
Explocity first encountered Rubi when she was playing a role in a play in Bangalore. Her first performance. Our review of the play, written by jazz singer, then Explocity features editor, Radha Thomas could have been reduced to its most striking—albeit cliched—headline… A STAR IS BORN!
This was in the late 90s and it was the first time anyone wrote about Rubi. We happily take the blame for unleashing Rubi on the world.
Since then, Rubi’s career has taken her across India and overseas in performances as an actor—both screen and stage, a stand-up comedian, a columnist and much more…boiling up to be named by the BBC as one of 100 women to have made a difference in 2014.
It’s 2022 and Rubi Chakravarti is wife, mother and a busy entertainer. Her success is made sweeter by the fact that she decided to become famous only when she had turned 40.
For the podcast, Rubi reads her favourite lines written by her muse, Khalil Gibran.
WHAT'S THAT WORD?! - "SLAPSTICK".
Co-host Pranati "Pea" Madhav joins Ramjee Chandran in the segment titled "What's That Word?", (or named by Ramjee's whimsy), to peel back the meaning of the word "slapstick", the origins of the comedic style.
If you have a word or phrase you would like to explore, join us live on the show. Reach us by mail: theliterarycity@explocity.com or simply, tlc@explocity.com.
Or, Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/groups/bangaloreliterarysociety
Or Instagram https://www.instagram.com/explocityblr/
If your word or phrase is selected, we'll call you.
Join our Facebook group, Bangalore Literary Society. It does not matter if you are not in Bangalore. This group is for anyone interested in language and words.
HELP EDUCATE A NEEDY CHILD
The Literary City encourages you to give to those children who struggle to get an education. We ask you to contribute whatever you can to The Association of People with Disability. The link to donate is: https://www.apd-india.org/donations. Visit their site and take a look at the wonderful work they do and find it in your heart to, well, teach a child to fish.
How many of us stop to consider how much rock music owes to literature?
Many of rock or folk lyricists of the 60s and 70s (and into the later years) were very well read. Many were students of English literature.
Here are a few examples.
Jim Morrison was a published poet. Chris Martin of Coldplay mastered Greek and Latin, Sterling Morrison, a Ph.D. in Medieval Literature, Rivers Cuomo graduated from Harvard University in English, Jeff Schroeder, Ph.D in Comparative Literature at UCLA.
A couple of honourable mentions:
Brian May of Queen, Ph.D. in Astrophysics, Art Garfunkel a master’s in Math, Tom Morello of Rage Against The Machine graduated from Harvard in Political Science.
And then there were songs inspired by Literature:
Wuthering Heights by Kate Bush based on the book by Emily Bronte. Pigs by Pink Floyd was inspired by George Orwell’s 1984 as was Testify by Rage Against The Machine. White Rabbit by Jefferson Airplane was a shout out, obviously, to Alice in Wonderland. Sympathy For The Devil by The Rolling Stones was inspired by Bulgakov’s Master And Margarita and also by Baudelaire’s World by Rosemary Lloyd. Metallica’s For Whom The Bell Tolls is, of course, straight from Ernest Hemingway. And India’s mega band of the 70s, The Human Bondage got its name from the title of a Somerset Maugham book.
Sort of puts paid to the whole under-educated, unwashed, drug-taking bad boys of rock. (Well, at least not the under-educated part evidently.)
Our guest today on The Literary City is Bruce Lee Mani. He is frontman of the famous Indian rock band, Thermal And A Quarter and he runs the reputable music school Taaqademy.
We talk about how his lifelong interest in words and literature shaped his songwriting.
The piece of music you hear coming into the segment is Bruce Lee Mani, singing all the vocal parts, a cappella, of his songs, Tomorrow. At the end of the episode, another treat, Bruce performing The Kindness Of Strangers in a songwriter showcase. Here's the links:
Tomorrow: https://youtu.be/eWSP-6VeVyI. The Kindness of Strangers: https://youtu.be/xJ9PCmfkZ94. Galatiqua. : https://music.youtube.com/watch?v=JBzAI8Fll74&list=RDAMVMJBzAI8Fll74
WHAT'S THAT WORD?! - "ROCK N ROLL".
Co-host Pranati "Pea" Madhav joins Ramjee Chandran in the segment titled "What's That Word?", or titled in whichever way Ramjee screws up the title, to peel back the meaning of the phrase "rock n roll", the central theme of the episode.
If you have a word or phrase you would like to explore, join us live on the show. Reach us by mail: theliterarycity@explocity.com or simply, tlc@explocity.com.
Or, Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/groups/bangaloreliterarysociety
Or Instagram https://www.instagram.com/explocityblr/
If your word or phrase is selected, we'll call you.
Join our Facebook group, Bangalore Literary Society. It does not matter if you are not in Bangalore. This group is for anyone interested in language and words.
HELP EDUCATE A NEEDY CHILD
The Literary City encourages you to give to those children who struggle to get an education. We ask you to contribute whatever you can to The Association of People with Disability. The link to donate is: https://www.apd-india.org/donations. Visit their site and take a look at the wonderful work they do and find it in your heart to, well, teach a child to fish.
Most, if not all of us, who studied English in school will recognize the opening passage in the podcast…which are the opening lines from Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar. Ol' JC was in the curriculum.
That passage is a favourite of my guest on this latest episode of my podcast , journalist and author, Amrita Shah.
She says she picked that one to read, for its humour.
When I was in my late 20s I was burning to write for a national publication. My target was… let’s call it “the Gentleman’s magazine”… Debonair.
Debonair was India’s Playboy. You read it for the articles. No seriously. You did.
Debonair—by design—had some of the most literary writing in the country. I figured that if I was published by Debonair, it would improve my street cred.
But what could be more WOKE back then than the fact that Debonair had a woman as editor. And that was Amrita Shah.
I wrote goofy sexual humor pieces for her that I thought were witty. Happily, so did she. I'm assuming...because we’re still friends.
Among other things Amrita Shah is known for her groundbreaking investigative pieces on the Bombay underworld. She interviewed the infamous Varadarajan Mudaliar in an exclusive cover story scoop for Imprint. And in her noteworthy career she has authored three books to considerable acclaim. By the illuminati.
MORE ABOUT AMRITA SHAH
Best-known for her pioneering series of articles on the Mumbai underworld Amrita Shah has edited features magazines Debonair and Elle and been a Contributing Editor with the Indian Express. She is the author of three non-fiction books: the award-winning Ahmedabad: A City in the World (Bloomsbury, 2015), Vikram Sarabhai: A Life (Penguin, 2007) and Telly- Guillotined: How Television Changed India (Sage-Yoda, 2019). She has also been a fellow with the Fulbright, New India and Homi Bhabha foundations, Institutes for Advanced Study in Nantes and Johannesburg and the Institute for Public Knowledge at New York University. She is currently writing a book on an ancestral journey across the Indian Ocean.
WHAT'S THAT WORD?! - "LOO" and "COBBLER"
Co-host Pranati "Pea" Madhav joins Ramjee Chandran in the segment titled "What's That Word?", or titled in whichever way Ramjee mauls the title, to peel back the meanings of the word COBBLER that Shakespeare used as a pun in the opening of Julius Caesar.
And joining us on the phone from Texas, caller and fellow word geek, Shashwat Sirsi. We discuss the nether side of the word, LOO.
If you have a word or phrase you would like to explore, join us live on the show. Reach us by mail: theliterarycity@explocity.com or simply, tlc@explocity.com.
Or, you can visit: https://www.facebook.com/groups/bangaloreliterarysociety.
Or you can go to our Instagram page https://www.instagram.com/explocityblr/.
If your word or phrase is selected, we will call you.
Join our Facebook group, Bangalore Literary Society. It does not matter if you are not in Bangalore. This group is for anyone interested in language and words.
HELP EDUCATE A NEEDY CHILD
The Literary City encourages you to give to those children who struggle to get an education. We ask you to contribute whatever you can to The Association of People with Disability. The link to donate is: https://www.apd-india.org/donations. Visit their site and take a look at the wonderful work they do and find it in your heart to, well, teach a child to fish.
The famous Alyque Padamsee said that Mahesh Dattani "...had given 60 million English-speaking Indians an identity."
Padamsee's trenchant comment holds much in store.
Most Indians who were educated in English became—through literature mostly—comfortable in our bilingual skin; multilingual, even. And Indian at heart.
In India, English is not merely a functional tool for administration and management for many. It is lingua franca for a number of urban Indians...a first language, while the mother tongue remains the language in which we best express our emotions.
But because entertainment, such as theatre, is an emotional vector, Indian languages flourished as the principle vehicles for stories.
Sometime in the 70s, Mahesh marvelled as a Prithvi Theatre audience connected easily, sensitively—and vocally—with a regional language play. Mahesh Dattani's audiences had connected with his productions...but only intellectually, not with the emotion and feeling they reserved for the language in which they expressed happiness and pain.
So Mahesh started to write plays. He writes in English and he tells urban Indian tales. And thus, he brought English-speaking India into the English language theatre 2.0—with neither artifice nor pretension nor the glorification of mediocre lives. Mahesh's characters are as real as your beloved though flawed uncle.
Not since RK Narayan... and all that.
And none, to our knowledge that have followed in as prolific and as competent a manner.
Mahesh Dattani's plays have been published as books and are widely available.
These are links to some of his more recent works. Of these, A LITTLE DRAPE OF HEAVEN in currently playing online. Tickets:
A LITTLE DRAPE OF HEAVEN
https://insider.in/a-little-drape-of-heaven-jan6-2022/event
MAHESH DATTANI'S PRODUCTIONS:
Thus Spake Shoorpanakha, So Said Shakuni
Watch: https://youtu.be/tMHRRrnG8Vk
The Big Fat City
Watch: https://youtu.be/0_Vc3rxKqVI
Park
Watch: https://youtu.be/5_WjYPm25_M
Do The Needful
Watch: https://youtu.be/hvxZK6mM9AE
(Episode cover photo of Mahesh Dattani: Rahul Valmiki)
WHAT'S THAT WORD?! - "BREAK A LEG"
Co-host Pranati "Pea" Madhav joins Ramjee Chandran in the segment titled "What's That Word?", or titled in whichever way Ramjee ruins the title.
If you have a word or phrase you would like to explore, join us live on the show. Reach us by mail: theliterarycity@explocity.com or simply, tlc@explocity.com.
Or, you can visit: https://www.facebook.com/groups/bangaloreliterarysociety.
Or you can go to our Instagram page https://www.instagram.com/explocityblr/.
If your word or phrase is selected, we will call you.
Join our Facebook group, Bangalore Literary Society. It does not matter if you are not in Bangalore. This group is for anyone interested in language and words.
HELP EDUCATE A NEEDY CHILD
The Literary City encourages you to give to those children who struggle to get an education. We ask you to contribute whatever you can to The Association of People with Disability. The link to donate is: https://www.apd-india.org/donations. Visit their site and take a look at the wonderful work they do and find it in your heart to, well, teach a child to fish.
If there is, at all, succession in life cycles, Prasad was a child of the Roaring Twenties. And not— as many might fall to wrongly assume—a lapsed constituent of the flower power years of the 60s, nor of the decade of anti-establishment protest that was the 70s.
Free of dogma, and always curious about where style is headed next, Prasad Bidapa is Downton Abbey meets The Devil Wears Prada.
Most people of talent communicate naturally. They use words, sometimes pictures and sometimes fashion; sometimes all of the above. Prasad is a writer, an incessant reader and a sponge to contemporary style.
In this episode, Ramjee Chandran talks to Prasad about his affinity for Oscar Wilde, the eclecticism in his reading and his curiosity for the movement in popular culture.
Prasad talks about education and the experiences he shares with wife Judy in parenting their children, Aviva Bidapa (see Instagram), a designer rising in popularity, and son Adam, who runs a homestay in the pretty hamlet of Pollibetta in Coorg. (Great for a weekend getaway, Adam Bidapa's homestay is Coorg Kolamotte Homestay, and can be found here: https://explo.in/3FATCqO.)
As someone who is non-judgmental, Prasad is not beyond letting a biting witticism escape him. Listen to Prasad reading Meryl Streep's monologue from The Devil Wears Prada with the conviction that only an insider can rock.
Prasad opens the session with a reading of an excerpt from "The Philosophy Of Dress" by Oscar Wilde. Here's the excerpt:
"Fashion rests upon folly. Art rests upon law. Fashion is ephemeral. Art is eternal. Indeed what is a fashion really? A fashion is merely a form of ugliness so absolutely unbearable that we have to alter it every six months! It is quite clear that were it beautiful and rational we would not alter anything that combined those two rare qualities. And wherever dress has been so, it has remained unchanged in law and principle for many hundred years."
NEW RELEASES
WORDLE has swept into the hearts of lovers of things that people do with words, beyond reading and writing them. Was Wordle a gift of love? A romantic story? With spinach? Find out!
(Play: https://explo.in/3tCRYm5)
WHAT'S THAT WORD?! - "THE WHOLE NINE YARDS"
Co-host Pranati "Pea" Madhav joins Ramjee Chandran in the segment titled "What's That Word?", or titled in whichever way Ramjee fumbles the title. They dive into the usage and etymology of the oft-used phrase, "the whole nine yards".
If you have a word, expression or phrase you would like to know more about, we would love to have you join us live on the show. You can reach out to us by mail: theliterarycity@explocity.com or simply, tlc@explocity.com.
Or, you can visit: https://www.facebook.com/groups/bangaloreliterarysociety.
Or you can go to our Instagram page https://www.instagram.com/explocityblr/.
If your word or phrase is selected, we will call you.
Join our Facebook group, Bangalore Literary Society. It does not matter if you are not in Bangalore. This group is for anyone interested in language and words.
HELP EDUCATE A NEEDY CHILD
The Literary City encourages you to give to those children who struggle to get an education. A shoutout to all institutions who help needy children get this education. We ask you to contribute whatever you can to The Association of People with Disability. The link to donate is: https://www.apd-india.org/donations. Visit their site and take a look at the wonderful work they do and find it in your heart to, well, teach
Anita Nair is one of India's best known authors, whose books have been translated variously and widely, into many languages and across the world.
Anita and Ramjee Chandran talk about literary critics with some funny examples of the acerbic wit that gives a knowledgeable and competent literary critic the right to "biting sarcasm". Anita is candid about her reaction to receiving a bad review.
Ramjee talks about what makes Anita Nair special. Her work ethic. Her training as an advertising copywriter and importantly, her sense of romance.
To us (Explocity) Anita is not only lovely and charming, but special. She is one of our earliest columnists going back to the late 90s. Her column "The Economical Epicurean" was her earliest effort at writing about food.
In this episode, Anita also talks about her mentoring program, "Anita's Attic". Aspiring writers looking to find their muse, and potentially their Mammon, can apply to become one of her pigeons. The next season of Anita's Attic is coming up to roost. This is a good time to apply. Here are all the details: https://anitasattic.com/
Anita and Ramjee, friends of decades, are both funny and inspiring in this conversation. He asks her if, in fact, she is Barbara Cartland. She responds that her study is pink.
Anita opens the session with a reading of an excerpt from her book, Alphabet Soup For Lovers.
WHAT'S THE WORD - "SEMINAL"
Co-host Pranati "Pea" Madhav joins Ramjee Chandran in the segment titled "What's That Word?", or titled whatever Ramjee decides to call it. They dive into the usage and etymology of the word, "SEMINAL". And its naughty undertones. "Pea" offers up a hilarious joke in this segment.
If you have a word, expression or phrase you would like to know more about, we would love to have you join us live on the show. You can reach out to us by mail: theliterarycity@explocity.com or simply, tlc@explocity.com.
Or, you can visit: https://www.facebook.com/groups/bangaloreliterarysociety.
Or you can go to our Instagram page https://www.instagram.com/explocityblr/.
If your word or phrase is selected, we will call you.
Join our Facebook group, Bangalore Literary Society. It does not matter if you are not in Bangalore. This group is for anyone interested in language and words.
HELP EDUCATE A NEEDY CHILD
The Literary City encourages you to give to those children who struggle to get an education. A shoutout to all institutions who help needy children get this education. We ask you to contribute whatever you can to The Association of People with Disability. The link to donate is: https://www.apd-india.org/donations. Visit their site and take a look at the wonderful work they do and find it in your heart to, well, teach a kid to fish.
What do you ask a guy who is one of the country's foremost classical pianists, a Shakespeare fanboi, a theatre company founder and now, an actor on a Netflix series?
Well, Ramjee Chandran asks Preetam Koilpillai everything.
In a fun, laughter-speckled interview, they discuss the problems with stilted education methods and the snobbery surrounding western classical music, which is why Koilpillai will not wear coat-tails and a bowtie in a performance.
In a double header, Preetam Koilpillai performs Schubert's Impromptu No 2 in Eb and he recites Shylock's speech from Merchant of Venice, exclusively for The Literary City.
WHAT'S THE WORD - "SPILL THE BEANS"
Co-host Pranati "Pea" Madhav joins Ramjee Chandran in the segment titled "What Was That Word?", or titled whatever Ramjee wants it to be titled. They dive into the usage and etymology of "SPILL THE BEANS". And—inspired by Preetam Koilpillai—"coat-tails".
If you have a word, expression or phrase you would like to know more about, we would love to have you join us live on the show. You can reach out to us by mail: theliterarycity@explocity.com or simply, tlc@explocity.com.
Or, you can visit: https://www.facebook.com/groups/bangaloreliterarysociety.
Or you can go to our Instagram page https://www.instagram.com/explocityblr/.
If your word or phrase is selected, we will call you.
Join our Facebook group, Bangalore Literary Society. It does not matter if you are not in Bangalore. This group is for anyone interested in language and words.
HELP EDUCATE A NEEDY CHILD
The Literary City encourages you to give to those children who struggle to get an education. A shoutout to all institutions who help needy children get this education. We ask you to contribute whatever you can to The Association of People with Disability. The link to donate is: https://www.apd-india.org/donations. Visit their site and take a look at the wonderful work they do and find it in your heart to, well, teach a kid to fish.
As everybody knows, the principal measure of gender equality is arm wrestling. Our guest on the show today is well-known actor and TV boss, Darius "Tuffy" Taraporvala. Tuffy handles his roles easily, whether he's playing a petulant Mozart, a clueless spy Bernard Boursicot, caught in his honey trap with Shi Pei Pu, a Peking opera singer or one of the Marx Brothers. Ramjee Chandran peels the layers off Tuffy in a fun, freewheeling interview.
THE WORD - "DUFFER"
Co-host Pranati "Pea" Madhav joins Ramjee Chandran in the segment, titled "What Was That Word?" or titled whatever the host wants it to be titled. They dive into the usage and etymology of "duffer". Heaven knows there are so many of those who plague us every day.
If you have a word, expression or phrase you would like to know more about, we would love to have you join us live on the show.
You can reach out to us by mail: theliterarycity@explocity.com or simply, tlc@explocity.com. Or, you can visit our Facebook group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/bangaloreliterarysociety. Better join the group. It does not matter if you are not in Bangalore. This group is for anyone interested in language and words.
EDUCATE A CHILD
The Literary City encourages you to give to those children who struggle to get an education. A shoutout to all institutions who help needy children get this education. We ask you to contribute whatever you can to The Association of People with Disability. The link to donate is: https://www.apd-india.org/donations. Visit their site and take a look at the wonderful work they do and find it in your heart to teach a kid to fish.
Explocity Podcasts presents The Literary City With Ramjee Chandran. This podcast is devoted to words—written, spoken or signed. Words rule everything...song lyrics, a movie script, a play, prose, poetry or a podcast. We will feature readers and writers, publishers, people of prose and poetry and playwrights. The Literary City podcasts will feature English language teachers, grammar police, literary lounge lizards...and, oh yes, a cunning linguist or ten.