Sixty blind men describing an elephant–that’s how it’s sometimes been with reviews of The Revised Kama Sutra: A Novel, and Debonair’s insightful review seems to cover aspects that India Today and Financial Express missed. This is the review of a literary aficionado and connoisseur. Debonair, the Playboy of India at the time, was edited, I think, by a literary person, who had made it classier and more literary.
A few quotes:
“Irreverence at its healthy best.”
“333 pages of pure fun punched with serious matters of contemplation.”
“An audio-reading delight.”
Two tiny errors: First, a mistake often made by Indians from other parts of India (a forgivable mistake, considering that India contains more languages and races/ethnic communities than Europe): The novel’s protagonist and his family are Mangalorean Catholic Indians, not Anglo-Indians. “Anglo-Indians” refers specifically to mixed-race Indians with British ancestors; whereas Mangalorean Catholics are merely Konkani-speaking Indians, originally from Goa, who have been converted to Christianity, many of them around 300 years back (other Indian Christians include Northeastern tribals and Keralite Christians, some of whom were converted many centuries back, and are Indian in nearly every way, including many customs and food, except that they have a minority religion). A second mistake: “invective” in the final paragraph should be “inventive.”
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