Before she fell asleep last night, my wife handed over a page from a newspaper that she wanted me to read. On the top of the story it said “Modern Love” and then “Now for a Quick Lesson in International Relations.” This is how the report, written by Evan Ratliff, began:

Shilpa was the first and only Bangladeshi woman who ever flirted with me. In fact she was the first woman who had even returned my glance in public since I arrived in the country two weeks before to report on Islamic fundamentalism and politics. Bangladesh’s population is 80 percent Muslim and correspondingly socially conservative. On the street I received plenty of stares but no coy looks.

I thought the piece was hilarious, and that it captured something essential and true. (I say this despite the fact that we have learned, because of mistakes that even hip folks like Monica Ali have made, to be wary of writers using people who, unlike them, speak English only in broken sentences.) The young policewoman, a mixture of aggression and timidity, and also so brilliantly sentimental, is much more defined than our out-of-place narrator. But he has his virtues too. His account of his foray into international relations is understated and sharp, and he conveys at each turn confusion and distance but also pleasing, inadequate charm. It also tickled me that an attempt to research a piece on fundamentalism should yield, instead, a little gem about failed and idiosyncratic romance.

Here’s another piece by the same writer, an equally hilarious one, that had appeared in the New Yorker last year:

On July 14, 2004, someone using the pseudonym Lonely logged on to www.moviecodec.com, a Web site dedicated to the technicalities of creating, uploading, downloading, and viewing digital video files. Typically, the site’s message boards carry headings such as “DX 50 and DIV3 Codecs” and “How Do I Burn AVI Movies to DVD with Nero 6 Ultra Edition?” Lonely, however, decided to create a discussion forum entitled “I am so lonely will anyone speak to me.” “Ok so how are you,” the first respondent asked. “Are you a piece of pig’s bollok?” Before long, a different breed of visitor had begun to arrive. “Dude,” someone named wetfeet2000 posted a little over a week later, “I typed in ‘I am lonely’ in Google, and your post was the very first response. Does that make you the most popular loneliest person on the planet?”

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An alert editor at Outlook has remembered that Satyajit Ray would have been 85 today. Here’s a piece that Sandipan Deb, who has now moved to Indian Express, wrote in Ray’s memory a couple of summers ago. (If you don’t wish to register at the site, just follow the first link above, and scroll down to find the article.)

In Pather Panchali, the octogenarian Indir Thakrun is greedy and thieving, yet we weep for her. In Charulata, the unscrupulous Umapada will betray Bhupati, but he is also devoted to his artless wife Manda. In Kanchenjunga, it’s the wastrel son-in-law who tells Manisha that she should not marry for any reason other than love. “Villains bore me,” Ray wrote once, famously. In Camus’ The Plague, Tarrou said: “I understand everyone, so I judge no one.” Ray made us understand.

Sandipan returned to this point about villains and what better artists do with them in another review article he wrote for the same magazine but this time on the great Mrinal Sen. (You can access that article by clicking on “More by Sandipan Deb” at the end of the above piece.)

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