Backlist Talk
“...um, ...eh,” began Vikram Seth, pointing out how inarticulate he was when it came to speaking. It was just a starting hiccup. For, soon the spilling audience at the quaint Bookwise in Delhi’s Shahpur Jat area were left spellbound in this chat between him and David Davidar. Seth’s dramatic rendering of Fire from his libretto Rivered Earth was absolutely combustible. On popular demand, he even read out a little from The Suitable Boy. As the evening wore off, and Seth wondered how the glass of red wine in his hands had a habit of replenishing itself, he finished off with a virtuoso performance of The Hare and Tortoise from The Beastly Tales, impersonating the Hare as an insouciant prima donna and the tortoise as a hard-working loser.
Bellow On Indica
After the blockbuster Breakout Nations, the next big book coming out of Penguin could well be Shashi Tharoor’s Pax Indica. The ex-junior foreign minister’s take on Indian diplomacy holds promise if this line from the blurb is anything to go by: “Indian diplomacy,” a veteran told Shashi Tharoor many years ago, “is like the love-making of an elephant: it is conducted at a very high level, accompanied by much bellowing, and the results are not known for two years”.
Line Correction
Oops! Biblio faltered while reporting about veteran journalist Kuldip Nayar’s memoirs, Beyond the Lines. It will be published by Roli Books, not HarperCollins. Roli Book’s Pramod Kapoor informs us it will be out by the end of this month.
