A Missive Hit
There is a war of words on in Bangalore, between actor and playwright Girish Karnad and filmmaker Girish Kasaravalli. A quick recap: Karnad had hit out against U.R. Ananthamurthy at the Bangalore Litfest recently, at a session meant to be a tribute to the author who passed away last month. Outlook carried a column on this, and Karnad’s other outbursts, by Sandeep Balakrishna three weeks ago. Now, Girish Kasaravalli seems to have circulated this piece to his friends by email, with a line about how he had always wanted to slap Girish Karnad. The missive found its way to Karnad’s inbox and he quickly shot back a mail to Kasaravalli, saying: “Let’s face it, you simply lacked the b***s to do it.” Kasaravalli is generally known to his friends as a mild-mannered, soft-spoken gentleman. Will he end it here or reply to Karnad?
For The Taking
The $50,000 DSC prize longlist is out. There are some predictable titles—Jhumpa Lahiri’s The Lowlands, Kamila Shamsie’s God in Every Stone, Khaled Hosseini’s And the Mountains Echoed, Shamsur Rahman Faruqi’s The Mirror of Beauty, Meena Kandasamy’s The Gypsy Goddess and Romesh Gunesekera’s Noontide Toll. But there are a few surprises too, like Jaspreet Singh’s Helium, Omar Shahid Hamid’s The Prisoner and Rukmini Bhaya Nair’s Mad Girl’s Love Song and Bilal Tanweer’s The Scatter Here is Too Great.
The Bard’s Cool
‘To be or not to be’ is of course the oft-quoted line from Hamlet. But it has a few more, like ‘The lady protests too much’, ‘Every dog has his day’, ‘Get the drift’, ‘What an ass’, which, 450 years later, we still use.
