Astral - Rajat Chaudhuri (Chutney Post)

Book Review - The Dollmakers' Island by Anuradha Kumar

2011-11-24T15:29:00.001+05:30

Enjoyed reviewing The Dollmakers' Island by Anuradha Kumar (Gyaana Books) for the Indo-Asian News Service (IANS). An excerpt from the review that appeared in the Times of India follows. Read the full review here:

Time travel with fairies and dollmakers

In "The Stone Raft", Portuguese author Jose Saramago writes about the Iberian peninsula breaking off from the European continent and going adrift on the Atlantic. The promise of a similar, albeit Indian, setting is what drew me to Anuradha Kumar's novel. Hardly a few pages into the story, "The Dollmakers' Island" turns out to be quite a different kettle of fish with its own quirky charms.Kumar's novel is layered history, close to the surrealist tradition, delicately spun with the gossamer threads of a Rapunzel like fairy tale romance that spans centuries ... Continue reading

Book Review - Nagaland: A Journey to India’s forgotten frontier

2011-11-02T12:16:00.000+05:30

Reviewed Jonathan Gancey's Nagaland: A Journey to India’s forgotten frontier (Faber & Faber) for The Asian Review of Books (Hong Kong). Excerpt:
He effortlessly serves up a rich anecdote here, a backstory there or an example of that endearing brand of British humour that they sadly didn’t leave behind when they folded up the Raj from India ...
Read the full review here.
You might also want to read reviews of this book in The Telegraph, Calcutta and The Guardian, UK. Glancey is The Guardian's architecture and design correspondent.

Indian Railways - Live Train Running info

2011-10-19T20:06:00.005+05:30

Good news for rail enthusiasts, travellers and worried relatives: Indian Railways has set up a new website where you can get live train running information (with speed, distance from next station etc) using GPS technology. The information is presently available on a pilot basis (so you get info on the Rajdhanis to begin with) but we hear this will soon be extended to other trains. Happy train tracking at Real Time Train Running Info site.

Copyright: Train image (WAP5 locomotive engine with train) courtesy Wikipedia. The file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike 3.0 License. More information about the file can be found here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:WAP5_loco.jpg

Book Review - Thunder Demons

2011-08-20T17:27:00.004+05:30

Reviewed Dipika Mukherjee's Malaysian novel Thunder Demons (Gyaana Books, 2011) for the Indo-Asian News Service (IANS). An excerpt:

Fractured Malaysian mosaic captured in fiction (IANS Book Review)
2011-08-20 15:20:00

Book: 'Thunder Demons'; Author: Dipika Mukherjee: Publisher: Gyaana Books; Price: Rs.280; Pages: 272

The allure of the Truly Asia slogan that draws tourist hordes to the cultural melting pot that is Malaysia has lost its lustre somewhere down the road. The country where Malays, Indians and Chinese live in supposed harmony has been suffering for long at the hands of the marauding demons of racism, religious intolerance and divisive ethnicity that have become a scourge of many modern nations. While the silence of moderate Malaysian voices has allowed religious militancy to strike roots, the concept of bumiputra or 'son of the soil' has fuelled tensions and suspicion - bringing Malaysia ever so close to ethnic strife ....

Read the full review at Yahoo News.

The Dressmaker of Khairkhana - Book Review

2011-08-20T17:11:00.000+05:30

Reviewed The Dressmaker of Khair Khana (HarperCollins, 2011) for the Asian Review of Books a while ago.

The Dressmaker of Khair Khana by Gayle Tzemach Lemmon
(2011-07-03) -- The fruit of painstaking on-the-ground research from one of the most volatile conflict zones of the world, The Dressmaker of Khair Khana will appeal to anyone who likes a well-told, inspirational story.
Gayle Tzemach Lemmon, a former ABC News reporter and Harvard MBA, writes in her introduction about her passion for stories about women who work in war zones, describing their work as "a particularly intrepid and inspiring form of entrepreneurship."

Read the full review at The Asian Review of Books.

Wordweavers Short Story prize 2011

2011-04-17T20:39:00.002+05:30

My short story - The Longest Night, a dark fantasy about time and invincibility won the first prize in `short story' category at the Wordweavers Contest, 2011. Wordweavers (Dhvani) is an initiative of EScribes Publishing based in Dubai, UAE.

You can read my story on the Wordweavers site here. And here you have all the other prize-winning entries from 2011 under the categories Poetry, Flash Fiction and Short Story.

Indian Literature review of Sudhir Kakar's Crimson Throne

2011-04-09T13:32:00.003+05:30

My review of Sudhir Kakar's historical fiction - Crimson Throne has been published in Sahitya Akademi's Indian Literature journal (No 261. Jan-Fen 2011).

Sahitya Akademi is India's national Academy of Letters.

Below is an excerpt:

Talking Heads

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The Crimson Throne by Sudhir Kakar, Penguin Books India 2010, Pp 255, Rs 450/-

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Sudhir Kakar's latest work of historical fiction opens in the final years of Shah Jahan's rule, with the arrival in India of two European travellers, who will document and tell the story of the bloody war of succession to the Peacock Throne.

The story begins with a brief prologue in which Niamat and Khwaja Chisti - eunuchs employed at the harems of the emperor and his advisor on foreign affairs - discuss the slow decay of the House of Timur. The year is 1653 and a ship from the west has brought a Venetian fortune-seeker to Goa: Niccolao Manucci is a young man with no formal education who grew up in the poor dock area of Venice but who has amazing language learning skills and by his own admission, acquired his education in the `school of life.' Continue reading (scanned pages in Google Picasa web album)

Sudhir Kakar's Crimson Throne reviewed in Sahitya Akademi's Indian Literature journal(Jan-Feb 2011)

Sangam House Writer's Residency 2012

2011-03-14T14:37:00.003+05:30

The application process for Sangam House International Writer's Residency 2012 is now open.

Sangam House is an international Writer's Residency which provides writers from around the world the opportunity to work and interact in a protective and nurturing environment. (part of this text, lifted from their website) I was lucky to be offered a chance to work and interact with other writers at Sangam House in 2010. The application process is fairly simple. Read more about the Residency and the application process here.

After the Quake - Japan on our Minds

2011-03-14T14:20:00.002+05:30

The high-intensity earthquake in north eastern Japan followed by a devastating tsunami has killed, maimed and injured thousands. The loss of lives and property freezes your senses while figures continue to pile up as rescue workers make their way into far flung areas cut off by the twin disasters. A few weeks ago New Zealand and parts of China (near the Burmese border) were hit by powerful quakes that had their share of human and material loss.

The Japanese disaster is complicated and seriously so, by the fact that some nuclear reactors on its Pacific seaboard have been affected, with a reactor in Fukushima-Daichi facing a possible meltdown situation. Thousands have been evacuated from the area because of this and doomsday scenarios are very much on the radar - remember Chernobyl?

While this may not be the time for debate, as hundreds and thousands hobble back to reclaim their lives or lie injured or dead under mountains of rubble, shouldn't we, sometime soon, stop behaving like children and stop believing that nuclear energy is a safe option to power our energy-hungry economies. That there is a problem with this `hunger' in the first place and that there are options like wind-power, small-hydro and others which merit far more interest than we are ready to offer.

As heart-rending images flash on television and the internet with its social networks and find-people pages try to reach out to the lost, Japan and the Japanese people are very much on our minds. As people around me bend their heads down to work, I take down After The Quake, a slim Murakami collection that he had published after the Kobe earthquake of '95. It is the book I would be reading for the next few days.

Copyright related notice: Fukushima nuclear plant image licensed under the Creative CommonsAttribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.

Glowinskis' Library - A Polish Wonderland

2011-03-02T16:21:00.003+05:30

Mr Glowinski

Today I received an email from a gentleman in Poland with a rare passion for books. With zero funding, Tadeusz Glowinski has built up a library and a Gallery of Illustrations with 6000 volumes in more than thirty different languages. I am sending a copy of my novel for his library. I am sure writers, book lovers, librarians, illustrators and others who visit this blog would take time to read more about his work and support this extraordinary effort.

I have posted his email below.

Dear Rajat Chaudhuri,

in the pretty Polish town of Olesnica, there is a particular library.

Please allow me to introduce you to:

The Foreign Language Social Library,

a part of the GLOWINSKIS' LIBRARY

The Foreign Language Social Library (a part of the Glowinskis' Library) is a very special one in part

because all of the library's books, as well as its huge gallery of illustrations (digitals and pictures),

have been donated by not only the illustrators and writers themselves, but also by librarians, publishers

and people with large hearts from around the whole world.

I would be honored and delighted if you would consider donating anything of your work to our library.

Your own book (with autograph or dedication), illustrations, and the like, would be most appreciated

by our readership and by me personally.

The Glowinskis' Library lends books at no charge, and I work in the library as an unpaid volunteer.

We depend entirely on people like you - large hearted people who love the printed word, books

and illustrations - to make what we do possible.

Please visit our website below to see who else has generously agreed to donate a small item of work

to represent them at our library:

http://glowinski.olesnica.pl/index.php?lang=en&page=galeria

http://glowinski.olesnica.pl/index.php?lang=pl&page=swiatowyksiegozbior

Thank you for your time and consideration.

With best regards from Poland,

Tadeusz Glowinski

Librarian

teddy@box43.pl

teddy@olesnica.pl

http://glowinski.olesnica.pl/

GLOWINSKIS' LIBRARY

ul. Waly Jagiellonskie 20

56-400 Olesnica

Poland - Polska

-------end of email ---

Mr Glowinski writes to say that till date the Glowinski library and the Gallery of Illustrations have collected works from 85 different countries.

Review of Usha K R's novel Monkey-Man

2010-12-16T14:33:00.002+05:30

The Mind of the Metropolis

Not long ago I reviewed Usha K. R.'s Bangalore novel, `Monkey-Man. The review has now been printed in the journal Indian Literature (No 259, Sept-Oct 2010). Indian Literature is edited by the acclaimed poet Subodh Sarkar and published by Sahitya Akademi, India's national Academy of Letters.

Here is an excerpt from my review:

Usha's fourth novel begins with a rush and an expectation. A strange half man half beast, the eponymous Monkey-man, leaps into the face of the reader and the characters, in a south Bangalore neigbourhood, poised on the bleeding edge of fast-changing times. The appearance of this liminal being described as `nasty, brutish and short' by the history teacher Shrinivas Moorty, one of the first to have got a good look at it, creates chaos, confusion and exictement in the city and in the mind of the reader. Riding this wave of excitement that hits Bangalore, the tuned-to-the-times radio jockey Balaji Brahmendra or just Bali Brums to his fans, rustles up a talk show hosting the first three persons to have seen the creature ... Read the full review (scanned pages saved on Google's Picasa web album)

Book reading at Crossword Bangalore

2010-11-25T01:13:00.003+05:30

I will be reading a couple of my short stories, alongwith three other writers, at Crossword, Residency Road, Bangalore from my story cycle which is a work in progress proposed for 2011. Time: 25th Nov, 6,30pm.

The event is sponsored by Toto Funds the Arts and Sangam House. Sangam House is an international Writer's Residency which provides writers from around the world the opportunity to work and interact in a protective and nurturing environment. (part of that text is lifted from their website) I was lucky to be offered a chance to work and interact with other writers at Sangam House this year.

Details about this event:http://totofundsthearts.blogspot.com/2010/11/sangam-house-reading-on-25-nov.html

Manu Joseph's Serious Men gets literary award from The Hindu

2010-11-03T13:06:00.002+05:30

The Hindu Best fiction Award 2010 went to Manu Joseph's debut novel, Serious Men. Serious Men rose to the top of a glittering list of contenders to win this newly instituted prize. A month or so back I had the opportunity to read and review Serious Men for the Asian Review of Books. You can read my review here.

I have included the shortlist for the Hindu prize below my post. It's interesting to find Kalpana Swaminathan's Venus Crossing, which bagged the Vodafone Crossword best fiction award this year, also on this list. I had reviewed Venus Crossing for Sahitya Akademi's, Indian Literature journal back in April. Venus Crossing, a collection of short stories, was incidentally one of my favourite reads this season; a book that will remain with me for years to come.

The distinguished panel of judges who selected the winner of the Hindu prize comprised of Shashi Deshpande, Mukul Kesavan, Brinda Bose and Jai Arjun Singh. The Hindu newspaper has been doing an important service to literature through its columns, the space it provides to writers and writing and now by instituting this important award.

The shortlist:

Eunuch Park, Palash Krishna Mehrotra, Penguin India, 2009

The Pleasure Seekers, Tishani Doshi, Bloomsbury, 2010

Venus Crossing, Kalpana Swaminathan, Penguin India, 2009

Come, Before Evening Falls, Manjul Bajaj, Hachete, 2009

Saraswati Park, Anjali Joseph, HarperCollins, 2010

Serious Men, Manu Joseph, Fourth Estate (Norton) 2010

If I Could Tell You, Soumya Bhattacharya, Tranquebar Press, 2009

The Thing About Thugs, Tabish Khair, Fourth Estate/HarperCollins, 2010

The To-Let House, Daisy Hasan, Tara Books, 2010

Way to Go, Upamanyu Chatterjee, Hamish Hamilton, 2010

Neti, Neti, Anjum Hasan, India Ink, 2009

More information about the award function, judges, sponsors is here.

Flash fiction: Broken-winged Butterflies

2010-10-20T18:39:00.007+05:30

A flash fiction piece written sometime ago appeared in Weirdyear magazine.

Broken-winged Butterflies
At the junction of Temple street and Constitution Avenue, less than fifty yards from the dusky image of a bitter goddess, is an old garden. A big and wonderful one with a quiet river flowing at its edge and the blush of roses on humps of alluvial earth. The painted see-saws and swings, now rusted are twined by aparajita creepers with glowing blue blossoms; wildflowers line the trails and the spin and dive of the broken-winged butterflies leave you distracted for a while.

Up there at the Temple Street metro station, where the day is already fat with its boredom, trickling out like too much sauce from a stale Mini-Sub ... Read the full piece at Weirdyear

New Short Story in Bhashabandhan (Festival Edition 2010)

2010-10-07T10:26:00.003+05:30

Bhashabandhan, Utsav 2010

The acclaimed Bengali literary magazine Bhashabandhan has published a new Bengali short story that I wrote this summer. It's a story of love, longing and time and things in between and things beyond ...

The Festival issue of Bhashabandhan has a strong line-up of writers, essayists and poets straddling Indian and world literature. The magazine is edited by the award-winning Bengali writer Nabarun Bhattacharya, who has given us gems like Harbart and Kangal Malshat. Grab your copy quickly; going fast!

Great Cuisines - Article in Bengali magazine Aramva

2010-10-05T17:58:00.006+05:30

Petuk Atlas (The Glutton's Atlas): My article about great cuisines, bad cooks and soft power in the festival edition of the Bengali magazine, Aramva. Though the published piece has some proofing errors it's good to see it in print. The accompanying photo is a lo-res scan of the first page of the article. To read the full piece and sample the writings of the excellent line-up of contributors to this festival edition, get hold of a copy.

A Story in Notes from the Underground

2010-09-27T18:13:00.005+05:30

The British literary and arts magazine, Notes from the Underground just published one of my short stories. The whiff of Dostoevsky in their name was what first attracted me to this fascinating magazine. Notes from the Underground can be found in over 350 outlets in England and in 32 key commuter locations in London, including the London Underground. My story, The Longest Night, is set in an imaginary city, is it Calcutta (?), in a time which is hard to pin down -

The Longest Night
It was still early evening when I had sat down to write. The sun had just set, and the gas-lights on the street below had been lit by the lamplighter. The glow from their orange flames caught on the metal-bodywork of a landau, as it rolled past our house. I could hear the carriage for a while – the rhythmic clip-clop of the horses on the cobbled street and the rattle of its wheels – till it took the turn near the Army and Navy store ... Read the full story at Notes from the Underground.

Copyright, 2010, Rajat Chaudhuri

A Rajasthan Diary in Tales of Asia

2010-09-22T16:09:00.010+05:30

Tales of Asia published my notes from a recent Rajasthan trip:

The Peasant and the Mystic - Uncharted Rajasthan.

The young man who was sitting next to me and who had earlier in the evening pinched my chocolates, was snoring away to glory. I knew it was him, because it would be impossible for the guy on the other side to reach across the aisle and try to filch my Cadbury bars from the seat pocket without somebody at the back of the bus noticing. However I did not mind, hoping luck would be on my side for the rest of this journey, into the deepest interior of Rajasthan, that I had begun earlier that night. I was traveling along the National Highway 8 (NH 8) from Jaipur which is the capital city of this western province of India. We were heading for Jodhpur, a distance of about 330 kms, on the first leg of a whistle-stop tour covering 2000 kms in five days of dense summer heat. I was on a research assignment and working against troublesome deadlines that sat in a permanent crease on my forehead, as I rushed through big cities, sleepy towns and far-flung villages, packing in as much as I could, in each precious day.
The bus had settled into a steady pace and the singing tyres on the good road had put many of the passengers to sleep. This was the late-night air-conditioned bus I had taken, after a hearty meal at the Fort Chandragupt hotel beside the Sindhi camp bus terminus where the lal-maas (red lamb curry) had been delicious and the peat-smoked whisky memorable ... Read in full at the Tales of Asia website

Review of Manu Joseph's novel Serious Men

2010-09-09T11:31:00.012+05:30

Just reviewed Manu Joseph's debut novel, Serious Men for the Asian Review of Books. Here is an excerpt:

Mani and Acharya are the two characters that drive this exquisitely plotted story, presenting a poignant snapshot of the Indian present where the pursuit of excellence and global aspirations cohabit with centuries-old mistrust rooted in the monstrosity of the caste system ...

Read the full review at the Asian Review of Books website.

Kalpana Swaminathan wins Vodafone Crossword Fiction Award

2010-08-21T13:22:00.009+05:30

Kalpana Swaminathan's collection of short stories `Venus Crossing' published by Penguin, India won the Vodafone Crossword Book Award for fiction this year. I felt the book was breaking new ground when I reviewed it for Sahitya Akademi's Indian Literature (No 256, March-April, 2010) journal a few months ago. Sahitya Akademi is India's national academy of letters. Here is the link to that review.Read news related to the Vodafone Crossword awards function. You can read the full review of Swaminathan's winning book (Venus Crossing: Twelve stories of Transit) by clicking on the image of that book below.

The Rainbow of Pain. Review of Venus Crossing, Kalpana Swaminathan (Penguin 2010) for IL journal

[The above image link will take you to the page by page review posted on a Google-Picasa web album]

Calcutta Watering Holes: Bar-dhyaker Bar-anasi

2010-08-10T12:57:00.005+05:30

The Bengali print magazine Arambha just published my Food and Drinks piece about Calcutta watering holes in their August 2010 issue. The piece is titled Bar-dhyaker Bar-anasi. The bars and arrack-gardens featured in this fun piece include Song Hay, Olypub and the legendary Khalasitola.

Bengali short story in Bhashabandhan

2010-07-26T10:19:00.007+05:30

One of my Bengali short stories was published in the July issue of Bhashabandhan.Bhashabandhan is a monthly literary print magazine published from Calcutta, edited by the award-winning novelist and poet Nabarun Bhattacharya (Herbert, Kangal Malshat). My story in Bhashabandhan is titled, Bokdharmik. Do get back with your feedback.

An Excerpt from a Could-be Novel in Eclectica

2010-07-18T14:29:00.007+05:30

Image Copyright Costel Iarca

An excerpt from a possible future novel, which is still a work-in-progress has been published in Eclectica (US). Eclectica is one of the oldest good-read magazines to be found on the web. You can read the excerpt here (Scroll down the page that opens and click on Fiction) The illustration that goes with the piece in Eclectica magazine is by the Romanian artist, Costel Iarca.

Review of Saratchandra Chattopadhyay's The Final Question (Shesh Prosno)

2010-07-18T14:25:00.008+05:30

I recently reviewed this English translation of Saratchandra's last complete novel (The Final Question-`Sesh Prosno'-Penguin India, Ravi Dayal) which was published this year by Penguin, India. The review appeared in Indian Literature journal published by Sahitya Akademi - India's national academy of letters. Here is a link to the review at my website. (The link takes you to scanned pages of the review hosted on a Google Picasa Web Album)

Book Review | `The Final Question' Saratchandra Chattopadhyay | Indian Literature (Sahitya Akademi)

My review of Venus Crossing, Kalpana Swaminathan (Penguin, India, 2010)

2010-07-05T12:53:00.022+05:30

My review of Kalpana Swaminathan's Venus Crossing was published in Sahitya Akademi's, Indian Literature journal (No. 256, March-April, 2010).

Glad to note that this book is on the shortlist of the Vodafone-Crossword Book Award (fiction) 2009. The Immortals by Amit Chaudhuri and three other accomplished authors are on the shortlist. May the best book win.

This is the fiction shortlist for the Vodafone-Crossword award:

The Immortals by Amit Chaudhuri – Picador India
Family Values by Abha Dawesar – Penguin Books India
If It Is Sweet by Mridula Koshy – Westland India
Nothing Is Blue by Biman Nath- Harper Collins India
Venus Crossing: Twelve Stories of Transit by Kalpana Swaminathan - Penguin Books India

I have posted a scan of my review of Kalpana Swaminathan's book (Venus Crossing: Twelve stories of Transit) on my website:
This collection of a dozen short stories by Kalpana Swaminathan is not like anything you would expect from your average IWE (Indian Writing in English) title. Swaminathan’s surgical realism, if we may give it that name, makes a brave departure from the surfeit of baggy prose and exoticisation that has come to characterize a large part of fiction being produced by Indians in the English language ...
To read the full review click here or on the image below.

The Rainbow of Pain. Review of Venus Crossing, Kalpana Swaminathan (Penguin 2010) for IL journal