induscrypt/literature

Kidnapped was the first western novel that captured my imagination as a kid.
...
"boys' novel" !

Interesting pic

Well worth a read, maybe even if you don't know the urdu literature or detest the idea of leftism.

Quite an arresting movie.

Last Sunday I found Fiesta among my old books, still unread. I can say it was a book that picked its reader and its time. Ten years back I would not have appreciated it this much.
I could not fully grasp the choice of characters and plot, for now it was the style that swept me. Surprising how he could repetitively use the unsaid/unwritten to convey the import without making it appear overdone or without risking your missing it.

From the page: "A Taliban boy asked me why women can�t be like plastic bags and banned. The point is that the plastic bag was made in a factory but so was the boy. "

From the page: "For myself, my struggle for twenty years was to find the tone to tell the kind of story I wanted to in the kind of way I wanted to. And a lot of that had to do with trying to capture the noise, chaos and teeming-ness of India without making it phoney and a caricature. This is not easy when you write in English. The English language, after all, represents the character of the people it was born out of, the English people -- thus it is a language of understatement, reserve, coolness.

But Indian reality is anything but that -- it is noisy, emotional, overheated, anarchic, folksy, swinging pell-mell between rationality and irrationality. So the task is to expand the language, bend it creatively without resorting to caricature. To find a tone that allows you a true story without too much simplification. And this has to be done keeping in mind the fact that the soul of literature is actually the intimate story, the small story.

The challenge then was to tell an extremely intimate story without forfeiting the right to talk of all the other larger issues that concern me hugely, and to tell it as close to the skin of India as possible, without 'fakery' or caricature. The triumph for me personally is that I found the tone that allowed me to do all this."
**I'll add to this review later**