Made in Manhattan
He was a much-married balding but brilliant author who once had a fatwa against his name. She was a wannabe with a hot bod and a modelling career. Surprise, Salman Rushdie and Padma Lakshmi have survived togetherness. Till now.

Cocktail book launches
Never mind how big the author is or how good the book is. The Page 3 people are regulars at these wine-and-cheese dos. Cocktails in hand, the words tend to flow, even if they are not always of the literary kind.

Scientific Indian
Twenty-something homegrown Asimovs are belting out bestsellers on the Harry Potter-meets-Time Machine template. And they are often great reads too. Case in point, Samit Basu, author of The Simoquin Prophecies (2004) and The Manticore's Secret (2005).

Money today
One bags a big one, the next a bigger one, sometimes with the publishers not having read even one-eighth of a chapter. What began with Arundhati Roy lives on with Vikram Seth's Rs 11.25 crore deal for Two Lives.

Passive observation
Time was when a biographer extensively interacted with his subject, did reams of research. Then came unauthorised biographies, lacking even a single interview with the subject. For a start, try recent biographies of Sonia Gandhi.

Reading for Dummies
See One Night @ the Call Centre advertised on MTV, and you know that Chetan Bhagat is the ultimate in literary cooldom. The tagline said it was a book for those who didn't read. Yes, they watch TV.

Inside outside
To think P.V. Narasimha Rao's fiction was perceived as true. Well, the former PM himself said The Insider (2002) was a novel-not autobiography, not fiction. It was anything but. The "explosive truth" about Indian politics is worse than what he depicts, anyway.

A clean breast of it
After a brilliant English, August, Upamanyu Chatterjee took years to write Mammaries of a Welfare State (2000), utterly incomprehensible even to his best friends. His recent Weight Loss (2006), though, more than made up.

Fan books
A new breed of cricket experts is afoot. Most have toured with the Indian cricket team, adore name-dropping and are high on trivia. Reverse sweep? Only if you must like cricket.

Photo finish
Every photographer has published one on photographs of Bollywood actors, or is busy compiling one. Words? Oh, the matter for the in-between space.

One-book wonders
They write a book, appear on TV once, and get their Warhol quotient of fame. Young, brash and full of ideas, but not always great prose.

Passport photos
The Indian diaspora strikes back. Everyone has written a book about being an outsider in a strange land, of life in flux, of living two lives, of... Oh, forget it. Turn the page.

Bahal bunkered
The man behind one of India's biggest sting operations has also won the worst accolade in the literary world. But that's what scribe-turned-writer Aniruddha Bahal gets for likening the sexual act to the workings of a Bugatti in his Bunker 13 (2003).

Makdi-man
There wasn't anything marvellous at all about Marvel comics' Spiderman-India series. A mask, and a dhoti? And you thought wearing the underpants outside was bad enough.

The making of ...books
Kickstarted by Satyajit Bhatkal's The Spirit of Lagaan (2002), today just about anything makes for a making of... book. Don't be surprised if you see a Making of the 1000th Episode of a K-Serial in the not so distant future.

Copy paste
Kaavya Viswanathan's How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild and Got a Life (2006) officially introduced a new word in Indo-Anglian literature-plagiarism.

Singh's songs
Khushwant Singh is still at it, with Death at My Doorstep (2005). Now, that's a funny thing to hear from the indefatigable sardar.

Chai, pani and books
They have tea and coffee bars in bookstores now. Now, if only they could read.

The great Indian cookbook
They come in two categories. The ones who will tell you how to cook, and those who will tell you how to eat. Eating-out guides not included.

Shobhaa De's brand of tell-all
About the Mumbai film industry, about the lives of the rich and the famous, about her husband, parents, daughters, dog. And about sex, and who's having it right now, and how.

Across the table
These days, you'll find coffee table books on the most outlandish of subjects. From desks to pencils to a day in an ordinary girl's life, down to her restroom time. Not everyone's cup of coffee.

Author wives
Nadira Naipaul, who is worth a tome herself.

More than bookstores
The mall syndrome has brought in the large bookstore, that has placed James Joyce and John Updike alongside video games and home décor.

The arranged-marriage writers
The Freudian equivalent of the diaspora writer, they claim to portray the plight of Indian women suffering arranged marriages, pickle-making and awful in-laws. Think Bharati Mukherjee and put the blame on The Tiger's Daughter (1972).

The longlisteds
Almost everyone of note has made it to one. But every time Indians see a name, a new celebrity is born. Only a handful make it to the shortlist like now, and then the euphoria is complete.

Mumbai nightmares
Of late, some of the best Indian literature has been centred around the Mumbai underworld. Refer to Suketu Mehta's Maximum City: Bombay Lost and Found (2005) and Vikram Chandra's The Sacred Games (2006). One more, and it'll be too much of a good thing. Like the Mumbai spirit.

Win-a-book-deal
Bookwriting contests. Write a chapter, and if they like it, you write the book. Never mind if you get published.

Tech book
The e-book and the mobile book. Made for everyone, especially the Netizen. Dubious on merit, but that's technology for you. The next bestseller? The sms book.

Index