Kirjanurkkaus

If I were making a country, I'd get the sewage pipes first, then the democracy, then I'd go about giving pamphlets and statues of Gandhi to other people, but what do I know? I'm just a murderer! The White Tiger won the Booker Prize in 2008 and I've read many good reviews about it, so I've been waiting to get my hands on the book for some time. The story of a lower-class entrepreneur, driving cars for the rich in India was bound to be interesting. The White Tiger consists of a series of letters, written by Balram Halwai (alias "Munna"), also known as 'The White Tiger', a Thinking Man and an entrepreneur. The letters are addressed to His Excellency Wen Jiabao, Chinese Premier, who is coming to India for an official visit to "know the truth about Bangalore" by hearing the success stories of Indian entrepreneurs. Balram Halwai takes on the challenge of introducing Wen Jiabao to the life of a self-made entrepreneur in India, because, as ...

Shiv now asks himself (or his father): What makes a fanatic? A fundamentalist? What makes communities that have lived together for years suddenly discover a latent hatred for each other? Githa Hariharan's novel about contemporary India deals with themes and issues that can be applied to almost anywhere in the world. How do the power politics of a society affect the lives of individual people? What can one person do about it: how do you make a difference when faced with a larger force both powerful and intangible? In Times of Siege explores a clash between the secular, plural version of Indian history and the more black-and-white version offered by religious Hindu extremists. This clash is most severely felt by the somewhat boring character of Shiv Murthy, an ageing Professor of History in New Delhi, whose lesson on one of the heroes of Indian mythology causes unexpected controversy among the more traditional circles of Indian society. Shiv, with the help of the radical young...

She felt like India, a mysterious country thousands of years old. Books could be written about her, but under all the written text and the coats of paint, deep inside her womb was something no one had yet grasped. This was why the Moghuls and the English, the Portuguese, the Dutch, the French, Coke and Pepsi, Star TV, everyone came, conquered, camped. The front cover of the novel includes an intriguing comment: "If Lolita had grown up in India, she might have debuted in a novel like this." I probably would not compare Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita to this novel quite so freely. The former is a classic written from the perspective of an older man, while Babyji is, in my opinion, popular fiction written from the highly subjective perspective of a precocious teenage girl. But let's not be too strict with the boundaries... :) Babyji tells the story of Anamika, a student living and studying in Delhi. The distinctly Indian novel relates her experiences of growing up an...