Writerly fragments

Nihal de Silva, the author of The Road From Elephant Pass, A Far Spent Day, and The Giniralla Conspiracy, all of which we have yet to read, was killed by land mines during a visit to the National Park with six others...On the 25th anniversary of Midnight's Children, Salman Rushdie reminisces about his struggles as an artist and his tussle with Indira Gandhi...Amit Chaudhuri is making his name as one of the finer literary critics from India. Check out his essay on Rabindranath Tagore and orientalism. Unlike many Indoanglian writers, Allan Sealy continues to live in India...Outlook India polls Sealy on his views on Naipaul, Wilson Harris and Ruskin Bond, his readership, and his new book Red in a candid interview...Amartya Sen's new book is picking up accolades as is Manju's Kapur's Home and her A Married Woman...Orhan Pamuk on, what else, the freedom to write and Julian Barnes, whom we always look forward to reading, on Flaubert...Londonstani is earning readers' notices...Perec wrote an entire novel without the letter "e." Christian Bök's Eunoia, on a cool Coach House site, has separate entries, each written with only one vowel...Monica Ali's Alentejo Blue shows that south Asian writers can write equally well about other cultures. Read a story excerpted from Ali's latest...Michael Billington, drama critic of The Observer (UK), describes the multilingual south Asian production of Shakespeare's Dream as "sexy," "savage" and "primitive." Charmed, we are sure...Outlook examines the fact and the legend of Bashir Badr who claims to be the greatest Urdu poet, ahead of Ghalib, Mir or Faiz...