How to look modern? Better still, how to look contemporary? As fresh as the daily newspaper.

Ila wanted a tank-top to wear this evening. The laundry hadn’t been done. So, her father had to dress her up in the garb of theory. Thank you, Susan Sontag. And, of course, the New York Times.

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Siddhartha at Sepia Mutiny has posed a series of interesting links to the new Vikram Chandra novel, Sacred Games. The book is almost a thousand pages long but I must say I’m a little bit impatient with the complaints about the book being too long–of course it is! It is as over-long as a Hindi movie. It is supposed to be that way. You are sitting in a small-town theatre in India. The Film Board certificate appears on the screen. Voices around you will always read out aloud the number of reels. And when the film is over, you’ll inevitably hear around you, “Thoda sa kheench diya.…” (Things were stretched a bit too long.) Size is a cliche.

I’m looking forward to Sacred Games because this is the first real engagement of Indian English writing with Bollywood. We have had attempts earlier, for example, Rushdie’s notion of the two-siblings-lost-at-birth (Midnight’s Children) and Kunzru’s Bollywood-myth-meets-cybertechnology (Transmission), but this book, the work of a Bollywood insider, is going to be, with all its strengths and, equally vital, its weaknesses, the real thing.

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Kamila Shamsie writes in the Guardian:

The civil war in Lebanon is, in fact, directly responsible for the existence of Saqi Books. In 1979, childhood friends André Gaspard and Mai Ghoussoub left a warring Beirut and came to London. Here, in Westbourne Grove, they started up Al-Saqi Bookshop, which quickly became established as a beacon of enquiry and intellectual exchange in London, providing readers in England with books about the Middle East as well as allowing travellers from the Middle East to buy books banned in their own countries. By 1984, Gaspard and Ghoussoub had ventured into publishing - a natural extension of the philosophy of Al-Saqi Bookshop - and three years later Saqi Books became an independent publishing concern.

Dar al-Saqi was established the same year in Beirut, with a mandate to publish seminal western texts in Arabic and also to provide a home for Arab writers, many of whom were unable to find publishers in their own repressively governed nations.

Beirut Photo by Simon Norfolk for the NYT.

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