More on Mr Kumar’s choice of words. "Offbeat and endearing" are his favourites. Why shouldn’t they be if Outlook, as his new book’s dust jacket suggests, used them to describe his debut book Passport Photos. Outlook would have loved to bring those words into play. But it didn’t. Not in its review of Passport Photos. The review published in Outlook (December 4, 2000) had this to say about his book: "...Kumar bases his understanding of the diaspora primarily in Occidental terms—in terms of Westward mobility.... He also misses the cosmopolitan radicalism of Kabir or the indigenous progressive revolution of Bhagat Singh: such experiences are necessarily excluded by the immigration-oriented western notion of post-colonial mobility.... Kumar’s obsession with westward sojourns will always prevent him from constructing a new history of resistance in which passports were alien and unnecessary documents." Outlook is yet to ascertain if some printer’s devil is involved but it would be endearing to know what vehicle it will take to accommodate such offbeat skulduggery.
Which allows us some self-indulgence. Outlook Weekend Getaways, the magazine’s first travel book, is on the top of the Indian non-fiction bestseller list.
