August 2009 - Posts - Bookends

August 2009 - Posts

Reasons to dislike Jaswant Singh's "Jinnah"

Posted by Samanth Subramanian at 
Forget the fracas . There are plenty of other reasons to dislike Jaswant Singh's Jinnah , which bears a curious and completely inexplicable triple-barrelled subtitle: "India - Partition - Independence." Here are a few; you may choose from these, or read the book and choose from many more. 1. The most misleading blurb in history: On the...

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Friday evening honour roll - 17

Posted by Samanth Subramanian at 
A thickly populated honour roll today, with a number of people also cracking the theme. Divya Anand mistook Roald Dahl for Kerouac; Prasanna Walimbe mistook him for Lewis Carroll. A couple of others got two out of four answers right. 1. Which famous literary character was probably as crazed as his name suggests because of the fumes from the mercury...

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Thursday afternoon books quiz - 17

Posted by Samanth Subramanian at 
Welcome back to your spot of Thursday afternoon distraction. This week, a theme: All four of the answers below connect up to a larger answer. So give me the individual answers as well as the larger theme. 1. Which famous literary character was probably as crazed as his name suggests because of the fumes from the mercury that he used in his millinery...

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"The Godfather," alive and kicking in Indian lending libraries

Posted by Samanth Subramanian at 
In a recent column , Nilanjana S. Roy (always a pleasure to read) raises an interesting question: Why is Mario Puzo's The Godfather still widely read in India? She doesn't really go on to answer that specific question, though. Apart from wryly noting that the Corleones, in being "the classic large, warm and utterly dysfunctional family...

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Friday evening honour roll - 16

Posted by Samanth Subramanian at 
Two people made it to our honour roll this week, and G. Sreekanth missed out on just the last question. 1. A. Oliver Twist , by Charles Dickens 2. A. Shakuntalam , by Kalidasa 3. A. Hamlet . This is Ophelia drowning herself, as depicted in a painting by John Everett Millais 4. A. Rubaiyat , by Omar Khayyam On our honour roll this week, we have: 1. Akshat...

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Thursday afternoon books quiz - 16

Posted by Samanth Subramanian at 
The quiz goes up a little belatedly today, but we have a uniquely themed quiz in store for you. Below are a series of paintings depicting various scenes / characters / themes in works of literature. So given the painting, just give me the name of the book. 1. 2. 3. 4. As always, email your answers in to samanth.s@livemint.com or leave them in the comments...

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Off-the-cuff links: Swine flu, and the nature of "epidemics"

Posted by Samanth Subramanian at 
The article isn't, unfortunately, all available online, but if you can track it down, it's worth reading. Jill Lepore, in the New Yorker , writes about an epidemic of "parrot flu," how it spread in 1929-30, and how the media's reporting of it had much to do with its spread. It reminded me a lot of the current swine flu situation...

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Friday evening honour roll - 15

Posted by Samanth Subramanian at 
A sparse honour roll this week, with only two people getting all five answers correct. Oddly enough, Midnight's Children seem to give some people trouble; the blanked-out words, of course, correspond to the title of the book. 1. "So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past." A: The Great Gatsby 2. "Before...

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Thursday afternoon books quiz - 15

Posted by Samanth Subramanian at 
We had a first-lines quiz before, which proved to be quite popular, so we're going to do a last-lines version this week. Given the last sentence of a famous book, name the book. 1. "So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past." 2. "Before reaching the final line, however, he had already understood...

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Where would you want to write?

Posted by Samanth Subramanian at 
Let us assume, for the sake of convenience, that all ardent readers want to be writers. (It isn't necessarily true. But we're assuming.) Let us assume, also, that we have the means to write at home, at our leisure, and to write not deadline-oriented 350-word pieces but multiple-year-long book projects. Finally, let us assume that we can design...

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