The awesomeness of Rajnikanth

The Matrix has nothing on this!

This was too hilarious to pass up on

Please tell me that I am not the only person who finds this funny.. it appeared on my Facebook RSS today.

The Tax Return of the humble Indian politician

I have copied here, an article from The Statesman, Web edition. This is rather interesting. It does appear that our politicians have little or no wealth, as they don't seem to pay much taxes. But that does not prevent them from ostentatious display. Read on.

A tale of stellar omissions

Vijay Thakur
NEW DELHI, April 26: Is buying property in the national capital region way beyond your reach? Are taxes eating into your hard-earned income? Such “aam aadmi'” concerns do not bother candidates for the Lok Sabha elections if the affidavits submitted by them to their returning officers while filing nomination papers are anything to go by.
Take the case of Mr Rahul Gandhi, the Congress leader projected as the party's prime minister in waiting. He can let you into the secret of owning property in the south Delhi area for as little as Rs 4.40 per square yard or a mere 49 paise per square foot.
For those with tax blues, it might be best to seek some advice from Mr LK Advani, the BJP's prime ministerial candidate. In his affidavit, he has not mentioned paying income tax, wealth tax and property tax in 2008-09. All this when he was the leader of the Opposition, drawing a fixed salary, and owns movable and immovable assets worth over Rs 3 crore (not including his spouse's assets of over Rs 50 lakh). The RJD supremo, Mr Lalu Prasad, whose family owns 36 immovable properties, does not fall in the purview of wealth and property tax, according to his declaration. However, Mr Prasad and his wife, Mrs Rabri Devi, owe the income tax department an amount of Rs 26 lakh, which they contest.
Mr Rahul Gandhi has informed the Election Commission that he owns a 4.692 acre farmhouse in Mehrauli which is worth Rs 9,86,244 as on March 31, 2008. This means his 22,700 square yards of land costs only Rs 9.86 lakh. At this value, the price per square yard of his farmhouse would be approximately Rs 4.40 or 49 paise per square foot. However, if property dealers of Mehrauli area are to be believed, Rs 10 lakh would not fetch even a 25 square-yard plot in any inhabited colony of Mehrauli which has water, power and other civic amenities.
Mr Gandhi's affidavit further contradicts his own claim. He has submitted that he is paying property tax of Rs 78,000 per annum on the farmhouse whose value is only Rs 9.86 lakhs. Similar is the case of the Congress president, Mrs Sonia Gandhi, who declared that the approximately 15.75 bigha plot of agricultural land she owns in Sultanpur village and Dera Mandi, is worth a mere Rs 2.19 lakh as on March 31, 2008, that is Rs 14,000 per bigha. Even barren land in remote areas of Haryana, Uttar Pradesh or Punjab is not available at this price.
Mrs Gandhi has also got her hands on some inexpensive jewellery. She claims to have 2,518 grams of jewellery valued at Rs 11,08,100, or Rs 439 per gram. Mrs. Gandhi also owns 88 kg of silverware valued at about Rs 18 lakh. Mr Advani has Rs 67.56 lakhs in banks and financial and non-banking institutions, another Rs 1.6 lakh of jewellery, and house and apartments worth Rs 2.35 crore. Yet his assets declaration states that he has paid "NIL" income tax, wealth tax, or property tax for the assessment year 2008-09. "If a candidate has written "NIL" in these columns, it means he has not paid any Income tax, property tax and wealth tax," said the returning officer of Gandhi Nagar. "We are not here to check the veracity of it. It is in the public domain, if anybody has any problem he is free to approach the appropriate authorities," the returning officer said.
Even income tax experts find it difficult to digest that a person who has assets of over Rs 3 crore and is earning a substantial salary as leader of the Opposition, has not contributed anything towards income tax, wealth tax or property tax.
"Before commenting on it, we need to see what he has submitted in his I-T returns. One can certainly make lots of tax saving investments, donations, or show expenditure. Without seeing his returns details, we can comment little on it," said Mr Rajesh Kumar, director of finance in a public limited company.
The RJD chief, Mr Lalu Prasad's declaration is similar to Mr Advani's. His family, including his wife, sons and daughters, own more than 36 residential, commercial or agricultural plots. Yet they have not paid any income tax, wealth tax or property tax for the assessment year 2008-09, the affidavit submitted by Mr Prasad reveals. He, however, owes the I-T department Rs 16.26 lakh while Mrs Rabri Devi owes Rs 9.79 lakh.
The story is no different for leaders of other political parties with only a few abiding by the letter and spirit of the Election Commission's model code. The EC might have made the disclosure of assets mandatory for all contesting candidates, but the real picture is not clear as candidates seem to be taking advantage of "technical/legal loopholes and jargons" to hide the actual worth of their assets.
The EC, however, washes its hands of the declarations made by the candidates. "Our job ends after we receive the affidavits from the candidates," said a senior official of the Commission. "The candidate has to declare the assets to the returning officer and we put it in the public domain. If anybody has any objection they can approach the returning officer concerned and file a complaint to the appropriate authorities," said the official.
The EC does not evaluate the declared assets, but since it is in the public domain, the concerned government department may take the initiative to check if the candidates are indulging in tax evasion and take punitive action, the official said.

The Tracey Fragments

Is a truly awful movie. Do not see it. Please

Just cos this is too effin' awesome to believe

Can you make a short action movie with no movement? This guy can!

Creation Science Fair

Read on here. It sounds strange, but give it a shot. I am not sure which emotion it evokes in me: pity or horror.

An old student

I ran into one of my old students today. She told me, somewhat apologetically, that she hadn't majored in anything 'remotely scienc-ey'. But she has found a job (quite a feat at this moment, I am given to understand) and will graduate and move out shortly. Is this how teachers feel when they see their students spread their wings and move out, full of enthusiasm and vigour, ready to conquer the world? Perhaps. I am not sure. But I think I will have many more opportunities to find out.

Rain

Shohorebrishti, the name of this blog means "rain in the city". It relates to a song by Suman Chattopadhyay, from his album 'Jatiswar'. I want to present here, this guest post from today's Statesman, where this writer (Tanya Ghosh) remembers the rain. At times reminiscent of Gerald Durrel and also Anita Desai, this is a wonderful little article.

One monsoon day

Tanya Gupta
Memories are funny. Of the billions of experiences, only a handful remain embedded in our grey matter. If they are pleasant, they are a source of comfort on difficult days. If the memories are not really wanted, they continue to haunt us, casting a shadow on happier days.
A remote small town somewhere in West Bengal. The skies darken, the clouds rumble and women scurry to remove clothes hung out to dry.
Children, asked to help their mother, are excited at the urgency of the task. Those too small to reach the clotheslines are asked to shut the windows. In older houses that have seen better times, women and children put pails in areas where the roof leaks.
Even the breeze seems to anticipate what is coming and its quality changes, carrying smells that become sharper and travel quickly. The smell of rajnigandha with a boring English name, tube rose, the night blooming jasmine (raat ki rani) fill the air with their strong scents. And then, without waiting for the mass of humanity to be fully prepared, thunder crashes somewhere and large drops of water fall on the dry earth. As the ground starts to grow moist, it gives off a smell that is elemental and primordial. Wet patches quickly grow and the ground becomes wet and sticky.
And the rain now comes down in all its fury. In the open field, boys take off their shirts, and a ball appears from nowhere, they kick it back and forth casually; and then someone shouts, two teams form and the game starts in right earnest. Players run across the field, with bare muddy feet, exhilarated to be fighting the elements and playing the good game. It is a moment perhaps they will remember and cherish later on in their lives.
In most houses, the focus is also elemental, but it is on food and not sport. “Monsoon snacks” are prepared. Young girls sit in the veranda and chat; then one sings a line of a song, the other runs in and gets a harmonium, and suddenly there is song, and if spirits are high, then even dance. Hot snacks arrive and for the moment all the senses are satisfied!
A little girl visiting her grandmother’s looks wide-eyed at the torrents of rain falling on the earth. The rain falls and falls and it does not seem that it will ever stop.
The boys finish their game and go home triumphantly to a scolding from their worried mothers (“if you fall sick now you can take care of yourself”), the girls finish their chai and singing and pack their instruments up and go inside. The buckets holding rain water have been replaced twice.
And yet the rain continues to fall. The girl wonders what will happen if it does not stop! She goes to sleep. When she awakens, the rain has stopped. The girl peeps outside.
The street is flooded but the rain water has stopped just short of the first step to their house. Any more rain and the house would have been flooded!
Her grandmother tells her what a good idea it was to build their house a little higher than everybody else’s ~ it was built for the monsoon.
The girl doesn’t pay much attention; instead, she imagines the house floating away in the sea, for miles and miles, she imagines building a boat and exploring the huge garden, which is now a large lake; she imagines monsters lurking in the water, the “monsoon monsters” she calls them.
He grandmother sees her looking out and forbids her to go outside. Putting the little girl in her mother’s charge, she goes off for her afternoon bath. As soon as she is gone, her mother turns to her, and says: “So what are you waiting for? Let’s go!”
The girl’s eyes open wide. She says: “Really?”
And off they go! The little girl has never been in a swimming pool and this is so much better! Her mother tightens her sari around her and holding the girl’s hands firmly, steps into the water.
Water is up to the girl’s neck. Perhaps the next twenty minutes are some of the most blissful moments for the little girl. From imagining underwater monsters, and walking around the once-familiar garden to “Mum, I am swimming!” It is an unforgettable monsoon day.
Soon, it’s over. They hold hands ~ a woman who is still a girl at heart, and the little girl ~ and return to the house.

Possible newspaper headlines

So I had this wicked idea: take two or three headlines from CNN/BBC/NYT/W.Post/WSJ or whatever your daily fix is, and parse them into one headline. make it wicked. Ok, so maybe the idea is not original, but hey, contributions welcome!!

Here, let me start off with:

Executives at AIG who received bonuses above 1 million $ will not confirm belief in evolution!

A love story and nothing in particular.

The time traveller's wife is a wonderfully written book about a bloke who travels back and forth in time, without any control. It is dressed up as science fiction. But I think it is the most beautiful love story I have read in a long time. And that includes that one time I read a Helen McInnes all the way through expecting that it was a spy novel, only to finish it and realise that there wasn't a single spy there at all!

Also saw Bunuel's Le Charme discret de la bourgeoisie. I am so confused!

Provoked. Not impressed.

The title of this blog is rather ambiguous. Could I be provoked, but not impressed? Certainly. This is about the British film about a Punjabi housewife in England who is beaten and abused by her husband for 10 years, and finally burns him to death. The protagonist is played by the beautiful Aishwarya Rai. This woman is ethereal and angelic. Unfortunately, her acting follows in the finest traditions of the Keanu Reaves school. Her abusive husband is acted very ably by Naveen Andrews (damn, he gets in bed with Jodie Foster, and now this?!?!?). When she is in jail, her case is taken up by a women's rights organisation, spearheaded by Nandita Das. This was rather sad, Das is such a great actress, but she comes across as rather lame. The direction was simply bad. Lousy script, bad dialogue. Important story, which needs to be told, but is not told properly. But try to see it.

DNA

Turns out that the DNA used for coding the protein I am working with is damaged. We made a single residue mutation, which seems to have worked, as per the sequencer. However, there are several other insertions and deletions. These lead to frameshift mutations, among other things. That might explain our recent misery in getting the protein to behave.Well, back to the lab again....

BBC Booklist

This has been doing the rounds on Facebook, so I thought I should put it here, along with some comments:

The game is like this: The BBC figures most people will have read about 6 of the 100 books here. Instructions: Look at the list and put an 'x' after those you have read. Tally your total below.



1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen ( )
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien ()
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte ()
4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling ( )
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee ()
6 The Bible (Not the whole thing. I will. Some day.)
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte ()
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell ()
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman ( )
10 Great Epectations - Charles Dickens (Read an abridged version as a kid)
11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott ()
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy ()
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller ()
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare (Most of the good plays, some of the lesser plays, many of the sonnets
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier()
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien ( )
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks ( )
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger ()
19 The Time Traveller’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger ( )
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot ()
21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell ( )
22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald ()
23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens ()
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy (Couldn't get past a few hundred pages )
25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galay - Douglas Adams ( )
26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh ()
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky ( )
28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck ()
29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll ( )
30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame ( )
31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy ()
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens (What can I say? They liked abridging Dickens for Indian kids )
33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis ()
34 Emma - Jane Austen ( )
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen ()
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis ()
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini ()
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Berniere ( )
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden ()
40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne ( )
41 Animal Farm - George Orwell ()
42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown ()
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez (Still haven't finished this one )
44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving ()
45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins ( )
46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery ()
47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy ( )
48 The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood ()
49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding ()
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan ()
51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel ()
52 Dune - Frank Herbert ()
53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons ()
54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen ( )
55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth ()
56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon ( )
57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens (, and yes, I did read the original)
58 Brave New World - Aldous Huley ()
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon ()
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez ()
61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck ()
62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov ( )
63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt ()
64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold ()
65 Count of Monte Cristo - Aleandre Dumas ()
66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac ( )
67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy ()
68 Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding ( )
69 Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie ()
70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville ( )
71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens (, again, the real thing)
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker ()
73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett ()
74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson ( )
75 Ulysses - James Joyce (No, but did read "Portrait of the Artist." and bits and pieces of "Dubliners")
76 The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath ()
77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome ( )
78 Germinal - Emile Zola ( )
79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray ()
80 Possession - AS Byatt ( )
81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens ()
82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell ( )
83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker ()
84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro ( )
85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert ( )
86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry ( )
87 Charlotte’s Web - EB White ()
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom ( )
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (; so they have the complete Shakespeare, but only "Adventures of Sherlock Holmes?" That's a bit odd. And I have read them all! )
90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton ()
91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad ()
92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Eupery ()
93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks ( )
94 Watership Down - Richard Adams ( )
95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole ( )
96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute ( )
97 The Three Musketeers - Aleandre Dumas (, unabridged if Librivo counts)
98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare ()
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl ()
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo ()


My comments on the list:
disclaimer:

1. The BBC apparently thinks people are uneducated gits.
2. The people who concocted this list are pretentious prats. This is why: Yeah, too heavily biased towards Jane Austen, then the presence of Dan Brown is either someone's awful joke or someone's awful joke. Also, Dune. DUNE!!! If you wanted to put in SF in this list (which it lacks by miles, I should say, putting far too much weepy nineteenth century material instead, has the BBC not heard of Asimov/Clarke, or even their homegrown Brian Aldiss? Hmm... other notable omissions would be And Quiet Flows The Don (while we are on depressing Russian authors), and maybe Idiot.
3. And do allow me to suggest John le Carre's 'The Quest for Karla' (3 books about the SIS), also two of the canonical antiwar novels written: The Cruel Sea by Monsarrat and Len Deighton's opus 'Bomber'

Mutual incomprehension

When English speaking people do not understand something, they say 'its Greek to me'. What do Greeks say? Or Germans? Or Tamils? If you have ever wondered about such things, then this article will be an interesting read.

C's thesis defence, and other such things.

Chamaree defended her thesis. It was great.




There will be cake. Not a lie.








Featured above: the nailpolish incident:-
------------------------------------
Me: dude, you have no shoes on.
Chamaree: Yeah, I know. Check out the nailpolish.
Me: dude, this is your thesis defence! wait, what nail polish?











Citing Jonathan Colton and Portal for "Still alive". Very apt in grad school.

When the rich become too rich...

If I remember correctly, there was a line from 'The Good Earth' which went.. 'There is a way. When the rich become too rich, and the poor become too poor, there is a way.' These words, authored by Nobel Laureate Pearl Buck might be applicable in the current world. Read on.

Men's forum booed down

Read here.

The secular fabric of India (and how it is being slowly shredded)

The incidents in Mangalore, a week or so earlier have put us to shame. Well, not really. Here is a quick summary: certain (Hindu) blokes took violent umbrage at (unwed) women dressing in Western clothes and drinking in pubs and consorting with menfolk. Are we really surprised? The supposedly evil Western influence on our society is not new, nor unanticipated. Many, if not most Indians dream of visiting, and perhaps settling in the wondrous land that they perceive 'Amrika' to be. Successive governments in the last two decades have sought business and cultural ties to the West. Such is the measure of our 'success' that the word 'Bangalored' has entered the lexicon as what happens to a job when it is outsources, and Indians now send upwards of 80,000 students each year to the US, more than any other nation. But with this will come the intermingling of cultures and what was once considered profane will perhaps merely be frowned upon.

But allow me to hypothesize something. The wave of prosperity that our ties with the West have brought us are really linked to a tiny urban fraction of India. Noveau rich, you might say. And like most new entrants to the party, they would like to participate more than wholeheartedly. More loyal than the king, so to speak. And so they have embraced the worst of what the West has to offer with no regard for the virtues of self reliance and ingenuity which has made the US what it is. Thus, we have low rise jeans, tank tops and pubs. And eventually, perhaps, we will also have bling and Glocks. But what we have bypassed, and will perhaps never have is the vision of Messrs. Hewlett, Packard, Ferdinand Porsche and Steve Jobs.

So the wealthy of India continue their dalliance with the West, unmindful of the smoldering anger of our country's poor, whom we have forgotten. Them, we have sold down the drain by numerous trade agreements which fetter our farmers, by selling agricultural land to contractors and shooting poor people who dared to protest and by selling all the PSUs, instead of trying to make them profitable. Is it surprising, then, if fundamentalists, be them of any faith, can now recruit from the poor and the dispossessed? My friend R told me that everything in India is done to oppress women. I disagree. We have had a miserable record in many respects. Remember sutee? But things are changing for the better, if slowly. The danger is India will be torn apart as the urban rich waltz faster and faster to some Faustian copy of what they perceive the West to be, while the poor lie oppressed and forgotten.

The other thing I wanted to talk about was free speech. This is what Johann Hari said about free speech and how standards at the highest level are being subverted by diplomatic and cultural arm twisting, especially by the Islamic nations. How there are two standards and the media must never transgress by judging conservative societies by a liberal yardstick. This was reprinted in the Statesman, a respected national daily published in Calcutta. To my shame, this immediately resulted in the good (Muslim) citizens of Calcutta protesting (violently). The Statesman has since apologized (why?), but its editor and publisher have been taken into custody. This is what Johann Hari said about the reaction. Read what you will into this. In my opinion, this is another symptom of the cancer that grips our society. The existance of double standards (read the Indian civil code) and the subjugation of women are two equally hideous faces of the same disease. To cure one, you must also work on the other.

The 20 facebook profile pics for blokes

explained by this blog.

Guest post: Malgudi and its place in the world of words.

From today's online edition of the Calcutta Telegraph.

THE DIGNITY OF THE SMALL PERSON IS IMPORTANT

W.H. Auden and R.K. Narayan have steered Alexander McCall Smith in the direction that his writing has followed

Returning, then, to the question which sparked these observations on influence: what has influenced me? The answer that I usually give is a brief one — my principal literary influences are that great poet, W.H. Auden, and that great novelist, R.K. Narayan. These are the two writers who, I think, steered me more than anybody else in the direction that my writing has followed. To this list I might add a stylistic, linguistic influence which I think was extremely important for me — the Book of Common Prayer, that great liturgical masterpiece that was used in the Anglican Church, including the Anglican churches in India, and indeed the Episcopal Church of Scotland, until it was largely replaced by the arid forms of modern liturgy. The Book of Common Prayer, alongside the Authorized Version of King James VI of Scotland and James I of England, gave great linguistic richness to the English language. The powerful Cranmerian prose of the Book of Common Prayer must have formed the deep linguistic patterns of many writers raised in observant households.

How did I get to R.K. Narayan? Well, I think that I can detect the outlines of the path that led me to that happy meeting. As a boy, I obviously had no experience of India. I was, however, born and spent my childhood in one of the last corners of the Empire, and so it is not surprising that I was exposed to Kipling. Now I know that there are many who have a low opinion of Kipling, and I do not wish to enter into the debate, but the fact of the matter is that some of my earliest reading was of The Jungle Book and the Just So Stories. Mowgli and Kim were very real to me, and I also remember being utterly entranced by Kipling’s story, “Rikki Tiki Tavi”, which I read so often that I could virtually recite it word for word. How painful it is to think back to those lost days, when one remembered the exact words of what one read — it is hardly possible to do that later in life.

But there I was reading Kipling’s Indian tales and being drawn subconsciously into a relationship with a country that I had never seen. India was to me a great, infinitely exciting place — I knew the names of the cities and could point to then on a map, and I had, no doubt, all sorts of exotic ideas about this country. That, I think, was the germ of my literary engagement with this country, even if it was planted by a writer now regarded as very old-fashioned. Of course, this was nothing unusual — there must have been vast numbers of people who were attracted to India in this way, just as today there are so many people who find themselves drawn to America through the powerful influence of their films. We feel that we can know a country although we do not know it, or only see it on the printed page or in the flickering images of the screen.

As a young man, my engagement with literary India continued to be somewhat unusual, mediated as it was through the work of a writer of the Indian diaspora, who rarely wrote about India itself, and by a writer who, having married into the country, came to it from outside. These authors were the Nobel laureate, V.S. Naipaul, who wrote about India in the Caribbean, and the remarkable Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, who lived in India for many years after her marriage. Then, fortunately, my reading took a more authentically Indian turn and I discovered the works of R.K. Narayan. I think, in fact, that I had read one of his books before the principal discovery — The Man-Eater of Malgudi was my first exposure to his writing, and although this book made an impression, it was not until a bit later that I found myself engrossed in the rest of his books. The effect, though, was profound, akin to my later discovery of the work of that sadly neglected English writer, Barbara Pym.

Now if I developed a taste for reading about India through the work of R.K. Narayan, what were his early influences? Narayan has left us a fascinating autobiography, My Days, which gives us an insight into his boyhood. He was, as you know, the son of a headmaster, and obviously in such a household he came into contact with a wide range of reading matter that arrived on his father’s desk for the school library. “My father,” he wrote, “ did not mind our taking away whatever we wanted to read — provided we put them back on his desk without spoiling them, as they had to be placed on the school’s reading room table on Monday morning. So our weekend reading was full and varied. We could dream over the advertisement pages in the Boy’s Own Paper or the Strand Magazine. Through the Strand, we made the acquaintance of all English writers: Conan Doyle, Wodehouse, W.W. Jacobs, Arnold Bennett, and every English fiction writer worth the name. ... Through Harper’s and the Atlantic we attained glimpses of the New World and its writers.”

From this it is clear that the influences which were playing a part in his literary development were many and varied — something which I think in due course showed up very clearly in the nature of his writing. R.K. Narayan enjoyed the great gift of being able to see the universal in one small slice of humanity — the occupants of a single town. How much of that gift came from his boyhood reading — from his voracious consumption of the literature of cultures in which he was at the same time both insider and outsider. The world of Wodehouse’s extraordinary country houses was very far from the world of his father’s school in Mysore, but it is this dissonance, surely, which gives the writer the insight he needs to describe the universal. For wherever we are, the small things of life are the same: the jealousies, the ambitions, the frustrations, the human striving.

And it is Narayan’s ability to capture human striving so perfectly and poignantly that I think has most deeply influenced me in my own novels. As a young writer, he of course knew what it was to strive after something and to find it seemingly unattainable. It was while he was still a student that Narayan purchased a copy of a book entitled How To Sell Your Manuscripts. He was not a particularly good student, possibly because he was too busy writing, but inspired by this book he sent his manuscripts off to London publishers, only to experience that rejection that almost all writers must face: the letters back saying that the publisher regrets that he cannot in the current climate, etc etc.

Narayan sent the manuscript of his first novel, Swami and Friends, to a series of London publishers, but to no avail. Then his first publication came — in the pages of the humorous magazine, Punch, no less — and it brought him the then handsome fee of six guineas. He now became a journalist but continued to send out manuscripts without success. The manuscript of Swami was still doing the rounds in London — still unsuccessfully — and Narayan wrote to a friend in London who was sending it out for him. If it came back again, he said, his friend should tie a heavy stone to it and throw it in the Thames. Fortunately, the friend did not take this advice, but continued to show it, eventually to Graham Greene. It sat on Greene’s desk for a while and then he read it and passed it on to a publisher with the recommendation that it should be published. That happened in 1935 and it was the launch of Narayan’s distinguished career as a novelist. In all he wrote fourteen books, each, in its way, a little gem.

The central themes that you find in a Narayan novel — the portrayal of the hero or heroine who strives to be something, perhaps unrealistically — is for me an immensely powerful theme, and one that is full of comic possibilities as well as great human grandeur. Life in this world is, for many, not easy: the barricades are not always in the right place, people do not always understand what it is that we really want, our abilities are not always as readily recognized as we would like them to be. But in spite of all the limitations that we have, we still have our dignity, which is so important to us. That is what Narayan teaches us — that the dignity of the small person, the apparently insignificant onlooker on the great dramas, is important. He helps us to sympathize and to understand. And he shows us, too, that in these small strivings of everyday life, there is the larger story of humanity’s potential for both kindness and unkindness.

One does not need a large canvas to portray all this. Remember Jane Austen, who famously said that she painted miniature pictures on tiny squares of ivory. She did. Nothing much happened to her characters — they led restricted lives in which the major question was often whether they would meet and marry a particular man. Yet these tiny squares of ivory are really great canvases that say a lot about what it is to be human. Similarly with Narayan’s novels, in the small events of their lives we see the big issues written large. And these issues are revealed in a clear narrative, in limpid prose — something that is not always evident today in contemporary novels. Narayan can ramble a bit, but he rambles clearly — if that is not a contradiction — and of course real life rarely goes from A to B without digression and excursus. In that respect, rambling may be considered a virtue from the social realism point of view.

When I wrote the first novel in my Botswana series of novels — The No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency — although I may not have realized it then, I now acknowledge that I was heavily influenced by Narayan’s example. I proposed to write about a woman in a smallish town; I chose for her a friend and assistant who had strived very hard to get where she got in life; I chose to make Mma Makutsi inordinately proud of her performance in the final examinations of the Botswana Secretarial College, where she achieved the hitherto-unheard-of mark of 97 per cent; I chose to make the society in which they lived an intimate one, in which reputation and status was important — all of these being typical features of the Narayan novels. Was I consciously imitating? No, I don’t think I was. The influence was, I think, more of that subconscious nature that I have alluded to earlier on. And so when a journalist interviewing me some years ago said, “Your novels remind me rather of the work of R.K. Narayan”, I felt a momentary surprise and asked, “But how do you know that?” — not realizing, perhaps, that this was not just a random, co-incidental insight on the journalist’s part, but something which was fairly obvious to anybody who knew both bodies of work.

What of Narayan’s reputation today? There are, of course, fads in the growth and decline of literary reputation; authors can be in favour one moment and then in the next, people may be heard saying, “Why on earth did anybody bother to read him or her?” Such is the fickleness of the public taste. I am not sure how extensively Narayan is read these days in the UK, for example, but I can say that when I mention him to even quite well-read friends, many of them confess that they have not read him. This upsets me every bit as much as when I hear that friends have not read Auden. The remedy, of course, is always at hand — an appropriate edition thrust into their hands with an earnest imprecation to read it as soon as possible. I hope, though, that there will be a revival of interest in Narayan’s novels in the United States. A couple of years ago, I was privileged to be invited to write an introduction to two new re-issues of omnibus editions of his novels, published in New York by Everyman’s Library. I was delighted to do this, and I have hopes that the inclusion of these books in a large and widely-circulated list in the US will introduce new readers to this very great writer.

If there has been a central theme to this lecture, it is this: that India has, through a number of writers writing in English since the late 1930s and up to the present, made an inordinately vital and significant contribution to the body of world literature written in English. I have tried to show, through an examination of my own experience and through an instance of literary influence, one writer upon another writer, how this affected my own work in a major way. In making this contribution to world literature, we outside India have been immensely enriched by the subtle, gorgeously human, and beautifully written prose which your writers have given us. Long may this process continue, and if Indian writers continue to win all the Booker prizes ad infinitum, then that will surely be richly deserved.