satire - Comfortably Numb

Book Look: Our Man in Havana by Graham Greene

OUR MAN IN HAVANA by Graham Greene. Penguin Books. So. How does this black comedy, this satirical send-up of the world of espionage measure up many many years after it was written by the Master in 1958? Very well, I would say. The story of how a hapless British vacuum cleaner salesman in Havana was…

Book review: Between You, Me and the Four Walls by Moni Mohsin

When gossip carries a sting The queen of malapropisms is back in our midst, with the third iteration of the chatty outpourings of the Social Butterfly, whose carefully curated gossip is, if you look hard, nothing but a sharp send-up of people, policies and lifestyles. In this book, Butterfly throws shade on a lot of…

Guest column: A day in the life

A day in the life of a troll Morning: Woke up at 11 am, totally exhausted. Busy night, sending short, pithy missives to various offenders across the country. So okay, the tweets were all off a set format but let me tell you, it still calls for some effort to key the message out and…

Book review: Destination Wedding by Diksha Basu

This is more a brief take than review. There`s nothing as delightful as light-done-right, a dictum I`ve tried to follow when writing both `No Strings Attached` and `Our Start-up Affair.` Diksha Basu`s DESTINATION WEDDING (Bloomsbury Books) gets that light-done-right down pat. The story sends up the Big Fat Indian Wedding in the most gentle manner…

Book review: A Secret History of Compassion by Paul Zacharia

Sending up everything and everyone A scathing look at life. The reader`s first reaction on reading A Secret History of Compassion is to muse over the probability that Paul Zacharia wrote up the story, then dipped it into a vat of caustic soda. Everything is grist for his mill, or rather pen, here: writers,…

Book review: Killing Time in Delhi by Ravi Shankar Etteth

A capital send-up Tongue firmly lodged in side of cheek, the author spins a tale about the denizens of Delhi. In this, Ravi Shankar Etteth`s seventh book, he has turned the spotlight mercilessly on the haut monde, the seriously wealthy and even more seriously powerful, the wheelers and dealers, the circles that trade in…

Book review: Scene 75 by Rahi Masoom Raza

On the people who lurked at the edges of the Hindi film industry. Ali Amjad. Harish Rai. Alimullah Khan. Peter the cook who is actually Ramnath. Writers, directors, cooks-turned-scriptwriters — the cast of this novel is made up of eternal hopefuls who land up in the Bombay of the 1970s to live out…

Humour: Indians lazy? How dare you!

The flip side of laziness A new study recently dubbed Indians the laziest people in the world. Sheila Kumar attempts a languid rebuttal What is this, I say. Why has this magazine study said that we are the laziest lot in the world? Do not believe this for a moment. The matter is deeper…

Book excerpt: Idle Thoughts of An Idle Fellow by Jerome K Jerome

An excerpt: Women are terribly vain. So are children, particularly children. One of them, at this very moment, is hammering upon my legs. She wants to know what I think of her new shoes. Candidly, I don`t think much of them. They lack symmetry and curve, and possess an indescribable appearance of lumpiness (I believe…

Book review: Return of the Butterfly by Moni Mohsin

Return of the Butterfly by Moni Mohsin I just made the acquaintance of the Butterfly. She knows all of Lahore, half of Isloo (er, Islamabad to us ?), half of Dubai and a good spattering of Delhi also; her understanding of world affairs is not too nuanced, she mixes her metaphors all the time but…