Love And Death In Kathmandu
Who killed King Birendra and his family? Evidence points to a crown prince gone berserk over a love affair. Not only does the new ruler, King Gyanendra, have to win over the people, he also has to address the unpopularity of his own son. Report from a country in crisis.

The VIP Catalyst
The sluggish rehabilitation work in the earthquake-hit areas of Kutch picks up momentum with the visit of Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee to the region. Now there is hope for the victims as well as plenty of sops.

Premium Drive
Despite the current slump in demand, a host of new premium cars are ready to hit the Indian roads in the coming months.

It's WWWar
With enemy hackers on the prowl, the new battleground for India is the Internet.

BOOKS

There's a Mole in South Block

A former foreign secretary wants to thrill but misses the plot

By Ashok Malik

Three ingredients are necessary to serve up a good thriller-plot, pace and detail. For all its other achievements, Indian writing in English seems genetically programmed not to deliver an intelligent thriller. Even accounting for the good reviews Vikram Chandra's The Srinagar Conspiracy received, local thrillers can be classified as promising, middling or downright disappointing. The Eccentric Effect falls between categories two and three. A former foreign secretary, Srinivasan alternates his story between Delhi and London, between South Block, seat of the Ministry of External Affairs (MEA), and Marlborough House, home to the Commonwealth Secretariat. Both stories are told intermittently, in the first person and the third person. Why the author experiments with so many styles is unclear.

The Delhi half is about a spy scandal-more a diplomatic incident than cloak-and-dagger stuff-with a bit of MEA factionalism thrown in. Srinivasan's protagonist, Chandrashekar Rishikesh, is a secretary in the foreign ministry. For those who're looking for autobiographical hints, he's called Rish and, like Kris-as Srinivasan is known-has an imperious boss who smokes a pipe. The London section describes the serial abduction of African diplomats and a Somalian Sherlock Holmes who walks around the city uncovering the truth. Its link with the adventures of poor straitlaced Rish in faraway Delhi is so tenuous that you wonder why the two are in the same novel in the first place.

Perhaps this is the natural bias of an Indian reader speaking, but Srinivasan's best lines and observations are reserved for the MEA. Sample a meeting in foreign secretary Hansraj Duggal's office: "Duggal's special assistant, a first secretary called Soni, sat... to Duggal's right, a pleasant young man with a smiling face, who took the minutes of Duggal's meetings. Duggal was believed to have Soni in prospect as a future son-in-law. Soni had to use his authority wisely, since the government machine, for want of decisions properly recorded by the competent authority, has long functioned on what was suspected, imagined or reported to be the views of the minister or the permanent secretaries."

FROM FOREIGN TO FICTION: Kris Srinivasan

It's all nice enough to evoke a twitter-but where's the action? Aside from the showdown between Rishikesh and his immediate rival there's nothing to rev up the adrenalin. Equally irritating are the profound banalities that litter the book; take the musings of OL' Rish himself, seated in the bar of the Delhi Gymkhana: "The monied upper classes huddled together for comfort, isolated from the masses in the poverty-stricken rural areas" or "To the bourgeois ... the low per capita income was almost a myth".

It's a truth empirically established that two days after retirement, every Indian bureaucrat begins to despair for the country. Srinivasan, as his book happily bears out, does not want to be an exception to this rule. Perhaps he will do fine as an editorial page columnist. As for penning thrillers, if he gets himself a good plot that actually goes somewhere, sticks to his knitting-describing the labyrinthine ways of India's foreign office-he may yet become a third world Jeffrey Archer. This book, however, is a quiver full of zeroes.

MetroScape

Theatre Of The Abused
Mahesh Dattani's 30 Days in September, a 90-minute play commissioned by Rahi, a Delhi-based support group for adult victims of sexual abuse and incest, opened to packed houses this weekend at Prithvi Theatre in Mumbai.
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