Bibliofile

It was a favourable mahurat, to borrow a word from the revised Oxford English Dictionary, for Indian English when John Simpson, chief editor of the Oxford English Dictionary, flew in for a short visit to their Delhi office. The number of Indian words in the oed, that "treasure house of the English language", has grown from a mere 400-500 words to several thousand in the new edition, according to the 46-year-old lover of English words, old and new, slang and Indian. And is growing so rapidly that the oed is planning a separate dictionary of Indian-English, somewhat like their Australian-English dictionary, only with new rules to accommodate this chaotic, fecund growth fuelled by Indian dailies and writers like Amitav Ghosh, Nalinaksha Bhattacharya, Firdaus Kanga et al.

Celebs of a different kind stole the show from economist Arjun Sengupta at the launch of his book, Reforms, Equity and the imf: An Economist's World. Publishers Har-Anand decided to launch him with such a bang that both Sengupta and his book were eclipsed by the celebs on the panel discussion. In a rare appearance, the self-confessed father of reforms, P.V. Narasimha Rao, talked at length on 1991, "the year India dared to dream". Finance minister Yashwant Sinha was there, too, ducking jibes from P. Chidambaram, who poked fun at governments who grow reluctant about reforms come elections. Two other former FMs, Pranab Mukherjee and Manmohan Singh cried off, but the journos were there in such numbers, even Sengupta's daughter had to stay outside.