Bibliofile

Roli Books, famous for its illustrated Kama Sutra coffeetablers, has gone in for a drastic makeover. Roli’s Pramod Kapoor spared no expense in hiring a clutchful of independent editors: Ira Pande from the Penguin stable, Renuka Chatterjee from HarperCollins and Kishwar Ahluwalia from the Star network, not to speak of Harinder Baweja from India Today and Namita Gokhale, who does her own imprint of books for him. Roli is also revamping its list with a new fiction line, books on films, bios, non-fiction. Of course, Roli’s bread-and-butter will still be the Kama Sutras in every language on earth.

There is nothing an Indian writer hates as much as ‘the label’. At the recent Poetry International festival in Rotterdam, poet Arundhati Subramaniam slammed the western quest for the "identifiably Indian": "Brandished like a visa (to what might seem like Destination Literary Paradise, but is actually a literary ghetto)."