I am surprised to realize the number of Harry Belafonte songs I heard as a child: “Day-O”, “Island in the Sun,” “Jamaica Farewell,” (which I can still remember and sing) and “Mama Look a Boo Boo” (which I only knew two lines of). I may forget, almost instantly, the name of a person I’ve just…
Barry Fruchter, an English professor at Nassau Community College in Long Island, reviewed the first, rather rough edition of Eaten by the Japanese: The Memoir of an Unknown Indian Prisoner of War in 1998, and though I have quoted paragraphs from it before, the complete review itself deserves nothing less than full publication and reading,…
We take so many things for granted. Life, breath, movement, the smooth operation of our four limbs. Until something happens to us to remind us of our fragility, that we are just bits of self-conscious cosmic dust floating around the universe. And something did happen to me: it was a long and painful mess. But…
“I didn’t know that Indians were allowed to write like this!” remarked one of three young Indians (who had recently read The Revised Kama Sutra and Impressing the Whites, located my email address, and gotten in touch with me in Delhi in 2002–around the time that V.S. Naipaul, was being feted in Delhi). Like them,…
Recently, I was approached by an Indian journalist who was writing about Indian prisoners of war of the Japanese in World War II? Did I have any photographs of my father of that time, presumably before and during the war? My father was one of the subjects/sources of that article, having written a book which…
I don’t know how many writers this is true of, though I hear, on one online writers’ forum, that it affects thousands. But here’s my tale of my quest to write freely and independently and express myself fully, post 2008 (when I published The Killing of an Author): This month, the royalties from my #Amazon…
Imagine living in a world with just one mirror, a mirror that is permanently fogged up except for one square centimeter of clear space in which you must see yourself. That’s what you are risking when you take that first benzodiazepine pill, and particularly if you use it nonstop for three weeks or more. Russell’s…
How does one even begin to describe a big book packed with a cornucopia of intellectual and historical riches, one that is from a lively writer, historian, and linguist? Though the title, Dancing on the Edge of the Widening Gyre: A History of Our Times, may have apocalyptic overtones, it is not a futuristic fantasy…
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