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Behind
Pakistan's Defeat
A
secret inquiry into Pakistan's debacle in the 1971 war held army atrocities,
widespread corruption, cowardice and the moral laxity of its generals
as prime reasons for the defeat in East Pakistan. The explosive Hamoodur
report has never been disclosed-until now.
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The
Nation
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Peace
Takes a Knock
The
Hizb has resumed battle, the killings continue and the Hurriyat is in
a quandary but the Government feels these are temporary roadblocks to
peace.
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AS
Good As It Gets?
The
economy has been chugging along well this year. Will it pick up speed
or lose steam in the coming months? Right now there is more optimism than
unease about the future.
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BOOKS
Chaos Chronicle
Yet
another 'great Bombay novel' that oscillates between cleverness and banality
By
Sharda UGRA
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 The
Beauty of These Present Things
Avatar Singh
Penguin
Rs. 250
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One of the
most endearing qualities of the great city of Bombay is its ability to
absorb and accept oddballs. Whether they be home-grown eccentrics who
busy themselves burning away bits of the city's fabric or changing its
name (to Mumbai), or those who arrive in huge numbers from all over India,
dreaming of making it big or merely making a living.
This capacity
to absorb and accept should by default also extend to the literary mini-genre
spawned by the city: the Bombay novel. It is perhaps the only reasonable
response to Avtar Singh's debut, The Beauty of These Present Things. The
book describes the passage of a single day in the lives of an aspiring
writer who sells real estate and a book editor from Delhi who tries to
reach and know him through his acquaintances and scraps of his short stories.
Singh shows
flashes of powerful prose, but the book is unfortunately peppered with
tiresome banalites ("I get out of the cab in a sweaty mess. But it's okay.
I'm cool") and what can only most kindly be called tedious guy-talk. His
main protagonist, Arjun, an angst-ridden 27-year-old wannabe writer, is
as interesting or memorable as angst-ridden 27-year-old wannabe writers
can be. There are rambling monologues about the meaning of life and passing
rants about the crowds, the poor, the slums, the pollution and the trains.
Arjun takes a passing swipe at the Big Indian Novelists, the authors of
"The Romancers or the Necromancers" and "The Blue Bedlinen", and even
makes a few self-referential statements about "Avtar, the only other writer
we hang out with". It's all too clever by half.
Where Singh
does better is with Katie Menezes, the book editor, and her encounters
with Arjun's friends. The interplay of characters starts promisingly enough,
well-defined etchings of people and places that soon fall into the novel's
big trap: it talks too much. Every character, situation and conversation
is not played out as overplayed. Loudly. To the point where flavour gives
way to flatulence. But could it all be a ploy to shadow Bombay itself,
the city where nothing is subtle and everything is "in-yer-face"? It's
a wiseass book but not quite that wiseass.
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 Web
Exclusives |
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COLUMN |
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 Don't
ask for more funds, demand the right to collect, INDIA TODAY Associate
Editor V. Shankar Aiyar writes to Chandrababu Naidu in Au
ContrAiyar.
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CHAT |
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 Read
the transcript
of
Wednesday's live chat with Vasudevan Bhaskaran, Chief Coach of
Indian hockey.
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BEAT
STREET |
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The
Mercenary Journalist
Pressures of meeting deadlines have always been
nerve-wracking in Kashmir. But never before has there been such desperation
to be the first to break news, writes India Today Special Correspondent
Ramesh Vinayak who has covered militancy for over a decade.
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TALKING
POINT |
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"May be Veerappan should be given a chance
to reform," Karnataka
CM S.M. Krishna tells INDIA TODAY Principal Correspondent Stephen
David as one of the options being considered to secure the release of
superstar Rajkumar.
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DESPATCHES |
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In
the eerie world of superstition that still exists in Andhra Pradesh's
Telengana region, four women and a man are brutally burned to death allegedly
for practising black magic. INDIA TODAY Associate Editor Amarnath K.
Menon says in Despatches
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Full coverages
with columns, infographics, audio reports.
»1971:
The Untold Story
This is a story not
told in Pakistan. A secret inquiry into the splintering of Pakistan
in 1971 held army atrocities, widespread corruption, cowardice,
even loose morals, among its generals in East Pakistan as prime
reasons in losing the war. The explosive Hamoodur Rahman report,
obtained exclusively by NEWS TODAY's Samar Halarnkar, has never
seen the light of day—until now.
»
Veerappan
Strikes Again
Kannada filmdom's top
star Dr Rajkumar at his rural farmhouse was rudely interrupted when
one of India's deadliest killers, Koose Muniswamy Veerappan,50,
burst in a half hour before midnight. .
»
The
Tiger Catastrophe
India's
national animal is in crisis in the hands of its keepers. The death
toll at Nandan Kanan Zoo in Orissa is now 12, nine of these rare
white tigers.
»
The
SriLankan crisis
Exclusive interviews, columns and infographics that track the battle
for Jaffna.
» The
Kashmir jigsaw
With both the governments and militants taking strong
positions, talks on autonomy could be heading for
a major showdown.
»
The
Nepal Gameplan
'secret'
new report obtained by INDIA TODAY lays bare the ISI's infiltration
in Nepal.
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