An Excerpt from this Eclectic, surprisingly varied book:
http://amzn.to/jr03jW
This is why every act of injustice matters, is important. For injustice is like a cancer, like a hundred thousand cancers growing in the different body parts of society.
Just the other day, legendary Indian editors N.Ram and Vinod Mehta were on a television show discussing journalistic ethics. But do they truly care and ensure that they and every employee of theirs, while wielding their enormous power, try to be just in every instance? And what about in publishing, which is an arm of the Press, a tool of freedom of expression and the democratic process of debate and of intellectual enquiry: does it not too deserve an Ombudsman?
To return to the story of Beauty Queens, Children and the Death of Sex: About two months before the launch date, the editor who had embraced the original manuscript and concept so enthusiastically was suddenly determined to suppress a few chapters. I resisted those attempts, but did not have the energy or the heart to withdraw a book that had been growing for seven months in my womb, and within two months would be out and alive in the world, a loveable if somewhat defective creature. So I compromised and accepted some cuts, though not all the cuts I noticed when the book actually came out.
So the baby that emerged was a book in which some parts had been ripped out: a baby missing an arm, say. However, because the ripping out was hurried, not all and indeed not most of the dangerous elements of the book had been cleanly ripped out. Which is not so easy to do with my work; a fan of my next book, Impressing the Whites, remarked that if I had submitted it to a regular Indian publisher, the final printed work, after the publisher had cut out the dangerous material, would have contained just two pages: the title page, and the Acknowledgments page So the end product was still dangerous, though somehow damaged, bleeding, not whole, lacking its integrity, a flawed child.
And this snippet about Mangalore:
And now, twenty-four tumultuous years later, I was on my way to see Dennis, a little nervous yet excited about the beans he might spill.
At the bus stand, where yellow-plastic-enclosed copies of "Rati Shastra" (the poor Indian's "Sensuous Man"—but this is a post‑1970 development) are still sold side-by-side with oranges and jasmine flowers, I took an autorickshaw past Kirti Mahal, St. Mary's Convent, and St. Joseph's Bakery to the path through dense tropical foliage—you had to walk now, assuming you could pick up your pulverized bones and step out of the auto‑rickshaw—and you were now in front of the bamboo‑obstacle that was the gate to Dennis's house.
This was pretty much the route I had traversed as a child. Things hadn't changed all that much since then. Dennis's house, an old, tiled affair with a veranda and a porch, enveloped in a leafy cocoon of tropical darkness, recalled that very time. As did the cobwebbed yellow walls, on which stained gloomy, framed photographs of various dead relatives lying in state alternated with occasional wedding photographs of assorted relatives, the newlyweds seemingly in a state of shock. A single, dominant steel cross completed the picture: Mangalore's obsession with death, marriage, and religion. Dennis, a lean man in a chocolate-brown sweater, lungi, and crudely cut leather sandals, his scarecrow frame topped by a shock of white Bertrand Russell hair, his glass-magnified eyes, Dr. Spock ears, and bony, accusing fingers magnifying the impression of eccentric intensity, looked most of his ninety-five years—until he started to hold forth from his "easy chair" pulpit in the manner and voice of an ancient but impassioned priest.
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