Bibliofile

Painters don’t generally rely on books for inspiration but Anjolie Ela Menon confesses to reading a lot when she is "in the painting mode". Not surprisingly, her favourite authors are all women writers: Iris Murdoch, Sylvia Plath and Arundhati Roy.

One person who may be cured of ever again attending a book event may well be Paris-based artist Vishwanathan. The painter walked into David’s book launch straight from the premier of his own documentary film, Calcutta, Hands, and having never been warned of an unfortunate tendency among Delhi’s bookish crowds, left his camera bag at his feet. It was gone within minutes: the camcorder with which he’d filmed Calcutta, his passport, money, paintings, all vanished within seconds.