Outlook Jan19, 09

Let's start the year with a heavy dose of self-publicity.

The Jan 19 issue of Outlook - first of this year - carries 2 letters of mine, which I wish to share with you:

The first one is on the article Arundhati Roy wrote after the Mumbai terror attacks:

Arundhati is clearly very rattled by the Mumbai attacks. Her prose, usually so lucid and a treat to read whether or not you agree with her, is this time rambling and repetitive. Along with the form, the function too suffers from a complete lack of new insight. Instead, she has once again propped up her all-time favourite villains—Gujarat genocide, "atrocities" in Kashmir, Hindutva, powerful and sinister politicians et al, which have supposedly led to this (almost justified!) retribution from the Muslims of the world. This is a tad too over the top. Notwithstanding the "decades of quick-fixes and dirty deeds", these terrorists were no disgruntled Indian Muslims whereby these attacks could be explained in the above context. I wouldn’t even term them as Pakistanis. People like them are above nationalities, owing allegiance only to their own pure hatred and warped mindsets, global citizens of the Terror Republic.


The second one is a response to the Happiness Prescription in an earlier issue:

I noted sadly that the list of books prescribed for happiness (Rev Up Your H Quotient) included not a single book in Hindi. Maybe it needed Manjula Padmanabhan, the selector, to be a more pan-Indian author to include gems like Raag Darbari (Shrilal Shukla) and a collection of essays by the great Harishankar Parsai.
R.G., on e-mail

Did they use my initials to convey that we were two different readers writing in?