Sit, Speak, Spar
Who can forget the soft-spoken Meira Kumar in the Speaker’s chair, trying to calm down our hyperventilating Lok Sabha MPs? Now, she has collected many of her speeches in the House in a book, Indian Parliamentary Diplomacy: Speaker’s Perspective (available in the Parliament library and Rashtrapati Bhavan museum), which was launched by President Pranab Mukherjee in the magnificent Yellow Room of his palatial residence. Kumar regaled the audience with many anecdotes. Early into her job, she wrote to speakers of various countries to find ways of controlling unruly MPs. None of them had any clear solutions except the speaker of the sunny archipelago Tonga. “But I couldn’t implement his methods here,” quipped Kumar. “He was a world-level heavyweight boxer.”
Homespun Covers
Big book launches with reds from Burgundy and Parmesan from Bologna by five-star poolside are gone. What works are intimate affairs with the author calling over a few friends, publishers and critics to her home to chat about the book over ghar ka khana and local hooch. Peggy Mohan, author of Walk in C-minor, had one in her house recently. Poonam Saxena, who has translated Dharmvir Bharati’s Chander & Sudha, ‘launched’ the book at her friend and photographer Dayanita Singh’s elegant house over the best home-cooked khao suey. Small is beautiful.
Choose It On TV
TV mogul, film producer and entrepreneur Ronnie Screwvala will sell his book Dream With Your Eyes Open like any of his films. No, there will be no trailer, but he has a multi-crore ad budget and the first of the stylish 30-second spots will soon be out in entertainment channels.
