Very recently someone asked me where we, the bloggers of Sepia Mutiny, find all our news stories from. How are we so on top of things? I told him that it was a trade secret but that it involved a few dozen well-trained chimpanzees sitting in front of computers in a basement in North Dakota, twenty-four hours a day. If PETA ever found out… You think that’s farfetched? Well, more about that in a moment.

The New York Times reviewed a book this past Sunday titled, THE RISE OF THE INDIAN ROPE TRICK: How a Spectacular Hoax Became History.

When John Elbert Wilkie died in 1934, he was remembered for his 14 years as a controversial director of the Secret Service, during which he acquired a reputation for forgery and skullduggery, and for masterly manipulation of the press. But not a single obituary cited his greatest contribution to the world: Wilkie was the inventor of the legendary Indian Rope Trick. Not the actual feat, of course; it does not and never did exist. In 1890, Wilkie, a young reporter for The Chicago Tribune, fabricated the legend that the world has embraced from that day to this as an ancient feat of Indian street magic.

How did a silly newspaper hoax become a lasting icon of mystery? The answer, Peter Lamont tells us in his wry and thoughtful ”Rise of the Indian Rope Trick,” is that Wilkie’s article appeared at the perfect moment to feed the needs and prejudices of modern Western culture. India was the jewel of the British Empire, and to justify colonial rule, the British had convinced themselves the conquered were superstitious savages who needed white men’s guidance in the form of exploitation, conversion and death. The prime symbol of Indian benightedness was the fakir, whose childish tricks — as the British imagined — frightened his ignorant countrymen but could never fool a Westerner.

When you’re certain you cannot be fooled, you become easy to fool. Indian street magicians have a repertory of earthy, violent tricks designed for performance outdoors — very different from polite Victorian parlor and stage magic. So when well-fed British conquerors saw a starving fakir do a trick they couldn’t fathom, they reasoned thus: We know the natives are too primitive to fool us; therefore, what we are witnessing must be genuine magic.

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SAJA is hosting a remarkable literary festival, an evening of readings in Manhattan.

Those reading include Suketu Mehta, Jhumpa Lahiri, Shashi Tharoor, Amitav Ghosh, Anita Desai, Kamila Shamsie, Manil Suri and Meena Alexander. Those mingling include Akhil Sharma, Jonathan Franzen, Kiran Desai, Marina Budhos, Pooja Makhijani, Meera Nair the author, and S. Mitra Kalita. Park Slope is apparently emptying out for the evening.

And the wine and samosas are for a good cause: SAJA is putting together fellowships to report the tsunami in-depth well after the initial reports fade.

The idea is to help a group of journalists… from the U.S. and Canada cover the affected areas SIX TO NINE MONTHS after the disaster and have their reporting available to a wide global audience… A New York Times story… explains it all… “All too often when disaster strikes, the relief mission seems to last only as long as the media attention.”

Buy tickets here.

Update: Please note the new schedule, which has been moved up by two hours.