All posts in the ‘ India ’ Category

I’m looking for a picture. Here’s the story. When I was planning and writing Love Potion Number 10, I wanted some helicopter lore. A friend introduced me (by phone) to Captain Rustom Captain, who had served as helicopter pilot to Jawaharlal Nehru, India’s first prime minister. Captain Captain, whose Indian civil helicopter pilot license was number 1, is now retired and lives in Canada. We had several good phone conversations about such things as makes and models of …Read More

A minor character in Jana Bibi’s Excellent Fortunes is Mr. Abinath, the town’s dispensing chemist. He plays a bigger role in book two, Love Potion Number 10 (scheduled to come out in May, 2013.) His apothecary is crammed full of medicines and cosmetics, including a line of vitamins he is developing. He wants to go beyond the commonly known vitamins (A, B, C, D, etc.) and formulate a concoction for every letter of the alphabet. I got the …Read More

Jana’s in India, folks. Well of course she’s in India. That’s where Jana Bibi’s Excellent Fortunes is set. What I mean is, in addition to the original book put out by Henry Holt (a MacMillan company), soon there will be an edition for sale on the Indian subcontinent, published by Random House India. RHI offices are in a high-rise building in Noida, a glittering modern town across the river from Delhi. Noida didn’t even exist when I was growing …Read More

Today is the first of eleven days of Ganesh Chaturthi, the festival celebrating the birthday of the elephant-headed Lord Ganesha. A favorite among Hindus, he’s the god of opportunities, the remover of obstacles. He’s also the patron of arts and sciences and the friend of writers. Even followers of other religions enjoy the ceremonies surrounding his birth. Traditionally, worshippers carry brightly painted plaster of Paris figures of Ganesha to a river or the sea and submerge them. Recently, …Read More

Elephants in kids’ books and movies. Aren’t they irresistible? Walt Disney’s 1941 creation, Dumbo, is still flying around, powered by his enormous ears. Jean de Brunhoff published the first of his Babar books in France in 1931, and the series soon crossed the Atlantic and never left. My son, at age two, was inseparable from his stuffed Babar. Recently I watched the Hindi film Haathi, Mere Saathi (“Elephants, My Companions.”) A smash hit in India in 1971, it …Read More

As I have mentioned, our next-door neighbors, Lalitha, Padmini, and Ragini, were in and out of our house in Chennai a lot. Left to right: Lalitha, Ragini, Padmini Lalitha and Ragini, alas, died way too young, but Padmini and my parents remained in touch for decades. All three stars live on in their Tamil, Telugu, Malayalam, and Hindi movies. The Travancore Sisters’ cousins, Ambika and Sukumari, were dancers and film actors, too. Sukumari (born in 1941) is still …Read More

Every couple of years, we came back to the United States from India for about three months. Some things my sisters and I loved about home leave: ice cream, television, and magazines to name a few. Other things we were less fond of, including running the gauntlet of inquiring relatives at family reunions. We could predict the questions: Have you ever seen the Taj Mahal? Have you ever ridden on an elephant? My sister Lee and I both …Read More

I saw a used hard-cover copy of the 2004 novel, These Foolish Things, by British author Deborah Moggach, for sale online for a mere $575.78. Never heard of that book, you say. Here’s a clue: it’s about British pensioners who land in a retirement home in India and…. Oh, right, right, it was the inspiration for this spring’s hit movie, The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel. For the 2012 paperback edition of the book, not surprisingly, they changed the …Read More

I’m looking through my dad’s address book. It’s got a worn green leather cover, and is bulging at the seams with stuff he inserted. He obviously copied some items over from an earlier book, but also taped in addresses from torn off corners of envelopes, return address labels, scraps of notebook paper, stickies of every color. Some things, especially notes to himself, he didn’t tape down, so you have to turn the pages carefully or bits of paper …Read More

I was asked recently to list the most striking differences between India of the early 1960s and India today. Oh my! Call in the pundits. For starters, then, there were about 440 million people in India; now, there are more than 1.2 billion. The cities have exploded—greater Delhi, for example, has gone from about 2.6 million to about 17 million. India is now one of the fastest-growing economies on earth. Perhaps most importantly, the communications revolution has arrived, …Read More