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My Friend Sancho
My first novel, My Friend Sancho, is now on the stands across India. It is a contemporary love story set in Mumbai, and was longlisted for the Man Asian Literary Prize 2008. To learn more about the book, click here.
To buy it online from the US, click here.
I am currently on a book tour to promote the book. Please check out our schedule of city launches. India Uncut readers are invited to all of them, no pass required, so do drop in and say hello.
If you're interested, do join the Facebook group for My Friend Sancho
Click here for more about my publisher, Hachette India.
And ah, my posts on India Uncut about My Friend Sancho can be found here.
Recent entries
Daniel Pepper of CMS has a worrying story up on how RTI activists in India are increasingly facing a…
This sentence says so much about the level of parliamentary debate in India today: Finally, marshals were called in…
The quote of the day comes from a post by Roger Ebert: Resentment is allowing someone to live rent-free…
Alex Tabarrok writes: Suppose that you are a cow philosopher contemplating the welfare of cows. In the world today…
[EWWW POST ALERT] Reader Deepthi B sends me a link to a book named “Natural Harvest - A Collection…
27 February, 2009
Illegitimate All These Years
Immense celebration happened on the day the Oscars were announced, for I’m a huge fan of AR Rahman and was overjoyed to see him win. And immense WTFness happens today, for Rahman says:
This award legitimises our music and the aspirations of hundreds of other musicians.
Legitimizes our music? All these years, all 17 of them since Roja, millions of us have loved Rahman’s music—so it wasn’t legitimate all this time? The crores of records sold in India, the four national awards, the 11 Filmfare awards, hell, the love of all his fans—and it takes an Oscar to “legitimize” his music? Et tu, Rahman?
I know many Indians still have this pathetic colonial hangover that leads them to crave validation from the West. I’d assumed that Rahman, just by virtue of being so good, had more self-respect than that. Well, such it goes…
(HT: Mahendra Shikaripur.)
Update: A number of readers have written in to say that maybe Rahman just happened to use the wrong word, that English isn’t his first language, that maybe he simply meant to say that Indian music has now got its overdue recognition from the West. I guess that’s a fair enough explanation of what may have happened.
Posted by Amit Varma in
Arts and entertainment |
India |
News |
WTF
