Bibliofile

How many people does it take to write a book? More than a dozen, if you happen to be Saddam Hussein. According to an Iraqi writer, Ali Abdel-Amir, Saddam did his writing in royal style. "He’d record the outlines of his novel on tape and palace employees would transcribe it and give it to the committee, whose members included a number of writers and intellectuals," Abdel-Amir told a news agency last week. "They’d write the novel and return it to Saddam. It would go back and forth until it got his approval." The system worked well, each of his three novels climbing up the bestseller list in Iraq and staying there for months. But his fourth book Get Out of Here, Curse You!, written sometime in 2002, never saw the light of day because of the war.

If former colleagues are turning President Abdul Kalam’s life into a cottage industry, blame it on retirement blues. The latest is Who is Kalam? (Konark) by R. Ramanathan, Kalam’s financial advisor in DRDO. He admits that he started writing the biography as a "useful way of spending my time after retirement". His daughter-in-law read the first draft and screamed, "Dad, I don’t see the man at all. You’re only writing about how you saw him officially!" That’s post-retirement lit for you.