HARRY POTTER BUSTS

I read today that 2.5 millon Harry Potter books are biting dust in bookshops and warehouses across US.

Is not that strange, given the stupendous hype that went with the publication of each Harry Potter book?

But I'm personally delighted. I have never been able to accept an insignificant author taking centrestage.

In fact, some four months back, I wrote an article attacking the Harry Potter mania in my column at

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Mrinal Bose

WHY IS ARUNDHATI ROY DIFFERENT?

Reading or listening to Arundhati Roy is always a learning experience for me. And hugely satisfying intellectually. Of course, I share her world view, but what amazes me about her is her way of thinking. She can think in a whole new way, without any allegiance to any body or thing or whatever.

The following are some quotes from an exclusive interview published in the Tehelka magazine dated 05.11.05.

** In India, we are at the moment witnessing a sort of fusion between corporate capitalism and feudalism - it's a deadly cocktail.

** To expose things is quite different from being able to effectively resist things. I am more interested now in whether there are new stategies of resistance.

** Somebody like me runs a serious risk of thinking that I'm more important than I actually am.. whereas actually is it or is it not? It's a difficult call.

**Fame is also a gruesome kind of capitalism, you can accumulate it, bank it, live off it. But it can suffocate you, block off the blood vessels to your brain, isolate you, make you lose touch. It pushes you up to the surface and you forget how to keep your ear to the ground.

**There is the danger,especially for a writer of fiction, that you can become somebody who does what is expected of you.

**Money is like nuclear waste. What you do with it, where you dump it, what problems it creates, what it changes, these are incredibly complicated things.

** Success is so tinny and boring. Everyone is promoting themselves hard.

** Giving money away is dangerous and complicated and in some ways are against my political beliefs - I do not subscibe to the politicas of good intentions - but what do I do? Sit on it and accumulate more? ..It's a peculiar problem, this problem of excess, and it's embarassing to even talk about it in a land of so much pain and poverty.

**People, ideologues who believe in a kind of redemption, a perfect and ultimate society, are terrifying. The idea of perfection has often been a precursor to genocide.

MRINAL BOSE

"FAKE SUPERPOWER"

The media is obsessed with a fake, false India. We cater to urban audience..but to believe that urban India is disinterested in the rest of India is the easy way out. If they're disinterested, we have to force them to be interested.. one of the most important roles of the media is to monitor public ferformances, be a kind of audit. Forty per cent Indians earn less than a dollar a day. One has to constantly hammer home this point that we're a fake superpower.

This is Vinod Mehta, arguably India's best newspaper editor, who has got integrity, tastes and openness in an interview with Tehelka on completion of ten years of OUTLOOK.

The iconic editor has a reputation for fighting with proprietors and leaving publictions. He seems to be going along well with the present proprietor.
MRINAL BOSE

When you're fifty, you have certainly known the world - most of it, if not in full.

In my case, I'm more comfortable with the world at this point with my knowledge and insight into its ways that I've acquired this long. I think I can live the rest of my life in a more informed and organized way.

But the idea of death scares me. Why must a man die? Why is life so short?

Akhtaruzzaman Ilius, an outstanding Bangladeshi novelist, once told in an interview that he would like to live three hundred years to complete his literary aspirations.

He was right, and indeed gave voice to what I find myself thinking these days.

Unfortunately, he died a few years ago when he was not yet eighty.
MRINAL BOSE

RUSHDIE"S NEW TAKE ON NOVEL

As the world has gone on in the last quarter century, it has shrunk. Part of that is communication, part of that is mass migration, part of that is economic globalisation, and yes, part of that is international terrorism. For a combination of all these reasons, our societies in different parts of the world bleed into each other, sometimes literally, to a much greater degree than was ever the case. So my stories have turned into these strange stories where to understand one bit of the world, you have to understand another bit of the world. In a way, it goes against the grain of the novel. The novel has something provincial in nature. The novel wants to be put in a small town with a couple of merchants and an unfaithful wife and tell the story. But the world ain't like that. Now you must put together a story that operates in many cultures and you must put those pieces of jigsaw together.

Yes, you guess it right: it's Salman Rushdie in an interview with the Times Of India dated October 16, 2005.

What does he mean actually? He has been talking like this post-9/11 for quite a while. I can't quite grasp his message. Is it an ostentatious excuse for the kind of novels that he's writing these days?

Is Shalimar the Clown a great novel?

MRINAL BOSE