In recent days, there has been increased chatter in desi media about Walter Semkiw’s books. [HT]
Did you know that Mahatma Gandhi has been reincarnated as Van Jones, the celebrated American civil rights and environmental activist who was named Time magazine’s “environmental hero” in the US in 2008?
“Objective evidence that forms the basis of past life studies prove that Jones is the reincarnation of Gandhi,” world’s leading past life researcher and best-selling author from the US Walter Semkiw told IANS in an interview.
World’s leading past life researcher? He certainly seems …

Chennai born Arvind Adiga has won the 2008 Man Booker prize and £50,000 prize for for his debut novel The White Tiger. Adiga, only the fourth first time novelist to win the prize, beat out established names such as Amitava Kumar and Sebastian Barry to win the prize for his novel that the Guardian describes as “a bracingly modern novel about the dark side of the new India”.
Adiga was born in Chennai in 1974 and was raised partly in Australia. Having studied at Columbia and Oxford universities, he became a …

Author of “A Golden Age”, Tahmima Anam was featured on this morning’s NPR Morning Edition Show.

‘Imperial life in the emerald city: Inside Iraq’s Green Zone’ penned by Rajiv Chandrasekaran made it to the top 10 books of 07 by New York Times. The NYT review is here and you can buy the book here.

Maximum City by Suketu Mehta.
As someone who spent a year growing up in Bombay (It was Bombay then), visiting often and having relatives there, much of this book read like Cliffs Notes for me. The few Bollywood Gangster movies that I have managed to catch over the years filled in whatever actually living there didn’t.
I also noticed that apart from a few details which are Bombay-specific, most of the themes are applicable to India in general. Reading about the way cops treat suspects, slums, poverty, red tape, politics etc. …

In the Amrikan version, Shiva wears pink goggles
The author, Sarah MacDonald, is an Australian. The Australian version of the book just had an image of Shiva on its cover. “How boring” the marketing folks thought when it was introduced to them in the US and A. In the US and A, we setup coffee shops on every street corner, create a neat logo, hype it up and sell a $0.40 drink for $4.00. We take $5 canvas shoes, add a swoosh and sell them for $50. Its marketing and capitalism …