Ila attends to the ritual aspects of kite-flying by overdressing like a Lahori.

Sylvia Plachy’s New York slide show here.

The photo above, “Lulu, Budapest, 1976,” is from Plachy’s country of birth.

Here’s a link to an interview with the photographer.

Via Paper Cuts who writes:

This thing is almost entirely about Roth’s grim assessment of the current state of American and world politics. “I’ve never heard people so despairing,” he says.

Also: When Roth is asked about Hillary Clinton’s candidacy, he replies: “If anybody can lose 50 states for the Democrats, I think she can.”

Very excited about the India-Pakistan finals on Monday. And here’s looking back with displeasure.

Update: Congratulations to Dhoni and crew. On another note, here Rahul Bhattacharya imagines Dhoni with grey hair.

Entry From Backside Only, refers to a phrase commonly used on signposts to indicate the rear entrance of a building. Binoo John, the author, said young Indians had embraced the variant of the language as a charming offspring of the mingling of English and Hindi, rather than an embarrassing mongrel.

“Economic prosperity has changed attitudes towards Indian English,” said Mr John. “Having jobs and incomes, and being noticed by the rest of the world, have made Indians confident - and the same confidence has attached itself to their English.”

…

The columnist Anjali Puri said pride in Indian English also stemmed from the success of writers such as Arundhati Roy, Vikram Seth and Salman Rushdie: “These writers have used English to portray Indian reality and it has given people the confidence to try out new words and play around with the language without being scared about whether they are correct.”

If spoken English can be curious, the written form is even more so. In railway offices, a standard opening line in correspondence is: “Dear Sir, with reference to your above see my below.”

As in Britain, employers complain that the standard of English is so abysmal that recruits cannot write a sentence without three grammatical mistakes. One call centre executive in Bombay said a new recruit wrote an email that began: “I am in well here and hope you are also in the same well.”

A glossary of the latest lingo as spoken on the streets of India:

Dear sir, with reference to your above see my below - popular opening line in official letters.
Teachress - a female teacher.
Timepass - a trivial activity that passes the time.
She freaked out last night - she had a good time.
Your lyrical missive has enveloped me in the sweet fragrance of our love - from a book advising lovers on how to write to girlfriends.
How often do you take sex? - question from doctor to patient.
Pritam Singh has left for his heavenly above - a death notice.
Hue and Cry notice - title of police missing person newspaper advertisement.
Don’t do nuisance in public - government admonition against urinating in public

More here. Via Ultrabrown.

P.S. Entry on Sept 22. Manjula Padmanabhan’s review of the book in Outlook.

Alan Bennett, whose diaries from the LRB I’ve used in my classes, was on National Public Radio. He was being interviewed about his new book The Uncommon Reader in which Queen Elizabeth “gets so absorbed in reading that even while riding in a carriage, she is reading a book with one hand while waving to her subjects with the other.” Once she begins reading, and changes ensue, a courtier describes her as having become “a handful.”

Update: Maud Newton’s L.A. Times review here.

My college buddy George Saunders (on Letterman) shows that he is funny all the time.

george-saunders-david-letterman

Ghost: Transmemoir
Bose Krishnamachari
Mixed media installation | 480″ x 84″ | 2006
Gallery ArtsIndia

(Hat-tip, the inestimable Brian Lukacher)

Anil Kalhan asks what happened to Pakistan’s Charter of Democracy:

The period of civilian rule in the 1990s was therefore one in which the army was able to “divide and rule” the civilian political leadership to a significant extent. And in this context, the agreement of Sharif and Bhutto to the Charter of Democracy was a significant signal that Pakistan’s most prominent civilian leaders were prepared to change the nature of their own political engagement with the army more fundamentally than when they had been tangling over short-term power in the 1990s. Perhaps recognizing the ways in which their own leadership had fallen short in the past, Bhutto and Sharif pledged in the Charter that they would not “join a military regime or any military sponsored government” or “solicit the support of military to come into power or to dislodge a democratic government.” Rather, they agreed that they would accept “the due role of the opposition” and, whether in opposition or in government, that they would not “undermine each other through extra constitutional ways.”

Also, my colleague Joe Nevins sends me this recent LA Times piece about the daily showdown at Wagah.

Photo from here

Here is William Dalrymple on V.S. Naipaul’s new book of essays:

A Writer’s People is an indulgent grand old man’s book: meandering, ponderous and pedantic, full of narcissism and touchy self-regard; it is as if Naipaul’s famous Olympian disdain has finally left him exhausted—the acidity of his own derision now makes him write contemptuously even of those he once loved and admired.

There is a tragedy here.As Philip Roth has so dramatically shown, old age need not mean the end of a great writer’s productivity. Humility, energy and ambition can still spur even the finest writer to attempt to scale ever greater peaks. Naipaul, in contrast, has died as a writer: the more he writes about his calling, the more impotent his pen seems to have become. The wisdom, the warmth, the humour and, above all, the compassion have all gone from the prose; and what we are left with now is only the bitter and desiccated husk of that once lively, warm and surprising writer from the village outside Port of Spain.