Bibliofile

In The Foot, Ha Ha

It must rate as one of the most engaging of book launches. Mani Shankar Aiyar for his Achhe Din? Ha, Ha! had this sparkling line-up of speakers: haw­kish Rakesh Sinha of the RSS, genial Harvard professor and Trinamool MP Sugata Bose, cantankerous CPI(M) leader Nilotpal Basu, mumbling BJP MP Seshadri Chari, garrulous Congr­essman Digvijay Singh, persuasive JD(U) spokesman Pavan Verma, domineering MIM leader Asad Owaisi and the professorial Yogendra Yadav, with a beaming Rajdeep Sardesai as the moderator. The best was Aiyar himself, who played the role of the clown before the real act began. Aiyar said he had contacted 22 current ministers to represent god’s party on the panel, but all declined. His hunch was if they came, they'd be chucked out in the next reshuffle (at which Chari said he doesn’t have to worry about which ministry he was getting).

Then proceedings heated up. At one point Owaisi rose from his seat, waved a finger at Sinha and said, “I will file a criminal defamation case for what you have said.” But the best one-liner was from Diggy. “Mani and I are best friends,” he said. “We are the only two people from the Congress with the foot-in-the-mouth disease.”

City of Jinns

Salman Rushdie’s new book, his first adult fiction in eight years in which he is said to delve into his old magic realism, Two Years, Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights, is in news. It’s cover looks like the title written on a black-board with chalk and then rubbed off partially. It’s set in a future New York, where inhabitants wake up after a ravaging storm to realise that they are all descendents of jinns, “whimsical, capricious, wanton creatures”. That’s eno­ugh magic realism in a short phrase.