The debut novel by Nikita Lalwani, Gifted, makes for quite enjoyable reading. It’s about an Indian girl’s coming of age in Cardiff, Wales, as a math prodigy pushed and prodded by an overly controlling father.

The father’s obsession with having his daughter achieve a very rigid kind of academic greatness should ring a bell with second gen/ABD readers, especially given the apparent desi fascination with things like Spelling Bees (often discussed here at Sepia Mutiny) and World Records. For most middle class desi kids growing up in the west, childhood is often (whether you like it or not) all about “studies” — and Lalwani’s book shows a case of that parental obsession taken to an extreme.

That said, Lalwani’s Rumi (short for Rumika) is in fact genuinely interested in math and numbers from an early age, and Lalwani does a good job of taking us into her head without drowning the reader in math problems. Though I’m not particularly mathematically inclined myself, I do remember there being a certain luminosity to math problems as a child/teenager — something beautiful in algebraic abstractions, or the spiraling concept of infinity in calculus. (Unfortunately for me, I tended to be more enthusiastic about the aesthetics of the math than in actually solving the problems at hand…)

Here’s a short passage from early on in Gifted, where Rumi (age 8 at the time) is chatting with her relations while on a trip to India. They are discussing real-life math prodigy, Shakuntala Devi, who was able to multiply two thirteen digit numbers in her head: Continue reading →

Literary bettors rejoice for the shortlist for the 2007 (Man) Booker prize is out. Last year, Kiran Desai won for Inheritance of Loss. This year there are two brown authors, both expats like Desai, on the shortlist: Mohsin Hamid for The Reluctant Fundamentalist and Indra Sinha for Animal’s People.

My book is not recommended in-flight reading

The authors on the shortlist this year are unusual. The only big-name author on the list is Ian McEwan, who is on the shortlist for the fifth time (he has won once before). His book On Chesil Beach is less than 200 pages, and therefore would usually have been considered a novella, which would not have been eligible. No other big name author even made the longlist:

When the Man Booker longlist was announced last August, pundits were somewhat surprised that many of the year’s biggest authors – Sebastian Faulks, J.M. Coetzee, Michael Ondaatje – were left off. [Link]

The remaining four books have sold an average of less than one thousand copies a piece in the UK, so they are hardly popular favorites. Other than On Chesil Beach, The Reluctant Fundamentalist has sold the most copies, with 1,519 books moved, and Animal’s People has sold the least, with only 231 copies sold in the UK, despite the sales boost from longlisting it. [Link]

I once translated the Kama Sutra

Both of the desi authors wrote books anchored in current / historical events that were major international tragedies:

The Reluctant Fundamentalist … explores the conflict experienced by a young Muslim who has been educated in the US, worked on Wall Street and fallen in love with an American woman, who finds himself treated with suspicion in the aftermath of 9/11. [Link]

Animal’s People … draws on the real-life events surrounding the Bhopal chemical plant explosion, seen through the eyes of Animal, a boy whose spine was twisted and so must walk on all fours. When an American, Ellie Barber, arrives to seek justice for the victims, he investigates her motives. [Link]

Continue reading →

This is the post, for which five of you have been patiently waiting. Finally, you get to dissect Maximum City, the first work chosen for the brown book club which I am horrible at coordinating.

If it’s any consolation, I have cringed and felt guilty that my work + ankle have delayed our exploration of MC, especially after reading two-months worth of comments and emails which asked about the fate of our summer nerdery. I know several of you couldn’t wait for this discussion which is so late, it is later than IST-late, and that is late my friends, yindeed.

Well, since I couldn’t get the job done, I got creative (read: desperate). I outsourced it to Uberdesi blogger Karthik. 😉 Here are his thoughts on MC; I look forward to reading yours in the comment thread below.

After weeks of procrastination and a few days of grim determination, I can finally, happily strike Maximum City off my list of books to read. I had borrowed a friend’s copy, and I left their house wondering why they were so enthusiastic about handing it to me, since they were supposed to be reading it for SM, too. Now, I know.

After putting myself through that, I was ready to express my thoughts, and so like many of you, I emailed ANNA about when we were going to start discussing the book. She said that if I wanted to “get the party started”, I was welcome to do so, since she still hadn’t been able to finish it herself. I know she’s busy, but that itself is telling, people.

One question kept popping up in my head. Why did he pick these people to write about? The answer was buried in the final chapter of the book; I wish Sukethu had chosen to add this to the introduction.

At times, Sukethu goes into details that in my opinion are not needed, and some are very violent. There is also a very haphazard way in which the book is written. I find this maddening, people come and go and scenes change quickly. Before you comprehend certain pieces of information, you are presented with new ones. Everything is a mishmash of thoughts and ideas.

There was also a lot of unnecessary repetition, reminding me over and over again of my old grandfather, who is like Mehta- also fond of telling us the same thing, repeatedly.

Continue reading →

Salman Rushdie got knighted over the weekend: he’s now Sir Ahmed Salman Rushdie.

Predictably, government officials in Pakistan and Iran have come out against honouring the “blaspheming” “apostate” Rushdie. It’s a brand of foaming at the mouth that we’re all too familiar with at this point; in a sense, the hostile fundamentalist reaction validates the strong secularist stance that Rushdie has taken since his reemergence from Fatwa-induced semi-seclusion in 1998. (If these people are burning your effigy, you must be doing something right.)

But actually, there’s another issue I wanted to mention that isn’t getting talked about much in the coverage of Rushdie’s knighthood, which is the fact that Rushdie wasn’t always a “safe” figure for British government officials. In the early 1980s in particular, and throughout the Margaret Thatcher era, Rushdie was known mainly as a critic of the British establishment, not a member. The main issue for Rushdie then was British racism, and he did not mince words in condemning it as well as the people who tolerated it.

This morning I was briefly looking over some of Rushdie’s essays from the 1980s. Some of the strongest work exoriated the policies of Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and indicted the pervasiveness of “institutionalized racism” in British society. Two essays in particular stand out, “The New Empire Within Britain,” and “Home Front.” Both are published in Imaginary Homelands: Essays and Criticism, 1981-1991. (Another great essay from that collection is “Outside the Whale” — required reading, though on a slightly different topic. And see this NYT review of the collection as a whole from 1991.) Continue reading →

A couple weeks ago I was standing on the train during my morning commute, my arm stretched all the way up so my finger could curl about the ceiling pole, idly twisting about on my toes in a half-turn to survey the crowd and eye-scape their morning reading for titles, authors, snatches of prose. What are they reading? I always wonder, like a ghost watching a feast. These days it makes me ill to read on the train, and I feel like I never have time to read real books–spoiled by my steady diet of magazines and blogs, I can’t quite digest those bricks of literature. That morning there were some romance novels, a Crichton, Guns Germs & Steel. A woman shifted, and behind her a gray-suited man’s folded back New Yorker came into view, the familiar Deco font, and like my mother’s voice the desi words sharpened into focus:

Karma, by Rishi Reddi, Harper Perennial; $12.95: Each of the stories in this startlingly mature collection shows first- and second-generation Indian-Americans attempting to manage the disconnect between cultures. The premise is hardly a new one, but Reddi’s understated prose and her choice of details give her revelations a quiet power.(link.)

Some part of me groaned. Karma? You’ve got to be kidding me. That’s really the best title you can come up with? Saying the premise is hardly new seems like the understatement of the generation. My skimming glance over the title story (then findable online, now sadly only partially available online as a pdf excerpt) quickly got me to a line that seemed worrisomely familiar:

. . Shankar and Neha were deposited on the threshold of their new life.

Oh not, not another catalog of the first apartment’s goods! Quick, do they mention those EIGHT DOLLARS? Continue reading →

Mohsin Hamid’s new novel, The Reluctant Fundamentalist, is getting quite a lot of publicity this week. I’ve been an admirer of his first novel, Moth Smoke, which I think of as giving a fresh, entertaining image of the changes occurring in urban Pakistan in the globalization era. It also has an irreverent, off-beat style, somewhat reminiscent of Upamanyu Chatterjee’s English, August. When I’ve taught it in courses on South Asian literature, I’ve found that students really tend to latch onto it — often more than writers like Ghosh, Rushdie, or Mistry.

Initially, I’ve been less than enthused about picking up Hamid’s new novel, along the lines of: do I really need to read another book about the tension between fundamentalism and modernity? This ground has been covered so many times already — starting with The Satanic Verses — that one doesn’t expect to be surprised. But the more I hear about the novel, the more interested I’ve become.

A good place to start might be the 20 minute interview Hamid did this week with Terry Gross, where (among other things) they spent a fair amount of time discussing how having or not having a beard affects how you’re perceived, in both Pakistan and the UK/US. Apparently this is a major theme in the novel as well; as a dariwalla (bearded person), I approve. I gather that Hamid’s point here is, if you want to grow a beard, grow a beard — don’t shave just because others might perceive you as a religious extremist. Continue reading →

[Warning: Spoilers!]

People who feel that The Namesake was too unrealistic might have to reconsider now that the “real” Gogol has emerged [via UB]. Vishaan Chakrabarti is a New York City architect. His father was a Professor (at Harvard, the book was set in Boston unlike the movie) and his mother a librarian who became a classical Indian singer. And yes, he had a nickname that he disliked enough that he legally changed his name while in college.

The Namesake’s Namesake?

Chakrabarti … has good reason to believe he’s the inspiration for Gogol, the protagonist of Jhumpa Lahiri’s novel (Kal Penn’s role in the movie). “Maybe it’s just coincidence that nine-tenths of the book is the same as my life,” he says, “but it was my friends who pointed it out. Anyone who knew me well saw the similarity immediately.” [Link]

[NOTE: Chakrabarti wasn’t trying to grab the headlines, a friend of his told NYMag, which then contacted him to inquire further.]

He met Jhumpa because, in real life, she was the proto-Moushumi figure:

He dates non-Indian women, to his parents’ chagrin, and, after his father’s death, shaves his head and lets his mother set him up for the first time with an Indian girl–which is how Chakrabarti met Lahiri. [Link]

However, as Chakrabarti himself points out, there was no grand drama between them, just a set-up that went nowhere:

Chakrabarti … does note many differences between himself and Gogol. Most important, he and Lahiri dated only briefly, not getting hitched and divorced, as in the book. Chakrabarti, who’s now married, says they simply never hit it off. [Link]

In fact, neither of them married Bengalis. I guess just being Bengali wasn’t enough . Continue reading →