Will someone suggest a caption for the above photograph? I saw this billboard near a highway in Bombay and understood that it was an ad for a newspaper called DNA. I would describe it as the pavement-level version of a Rushdie novel—self-satisfied metropolitan fiction for consumption by the metropolitans. It is not the buffalo who has decided to carry a reminder on its body that it must work for Bihar; instead, it is some clueless cosmopolitan who is announcing his never-to-be-really-actualized intentions about–what exactly?–social activism. If this individual has recovered from his new year’s hangover by now I’d like him to consider why the geography of a land and its peoples is reducible to the flat banality of a buffalo’s hide. No complexity here. No refinement of style. Just something as bare as a blackboard and chalk, elements in a dreamscape of juvenilia. Perhaps I am over-reacting but this is because the rag in question has dung in its DNA. I refer you, dear reader, to the non-review whose display of ignorance is exceeded only by its viciousness. Blind to the achievements of Siddharth Chowdhury’s striking debut novel Patna, Roughcut, in particular the presentation of a character who engages, with rare elan, world literature and cinema while rooted in his provincial locale, our fearless writer from DNA plants his hooves everywhere, flattening everything said in its 186 pages about artistic ambition, even enlisting poor Pankaj Mishra as a Bihari, and making a pointless comparison to The God of Small Things which makes you suspect that Arundhati Roy’s novel is the only other book the reviewer has read in the past five years. Didn’t someone suggest a while back that reviewers should have to pass some basic tests of literacy before they can be allowed to judge a book?

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