Word: amitav
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Today Bollywood is on as many screens in midtown Manhattan as in an Indian neighborhood in Queens. The literary world has learned to pronounce Vikram and Amitav and Jhumpa, and an Amrita Sher-Gil can fetch as much as a Warhol at auction. A click on the Internet instantly conveys the burgeoning scope of South Asian cultural confidence, yielding details of hundreds of art galleries, concerts, readings, plays and indie films. When I was invited back to Harvard for a South Asian night in 2001, I was ushered into a hall brimming with 1,500 heads of shiny black hair...
...followed by Lagaan and Bend it Like Beckham - two breakout hits by fellow Indian directors - and by my own movie, Vanity Fair with Reese Witherspoon. Today Bollywood is on as many screens in Times Square as in Jackson Heights. The literary world has learned to pronounce Vikram and Amitav and Jhumpa, and an Amrita Sher-Gil can fetch as much as a Warhol at auction. A click on the Internet instantly conveys the burgeoning scope of South Asian cultural confidence, yielding details of hundreds of art galleries, concerts, readings, plays and indie films. When I was invited back to Harvard...
...When Amitav Ghosh clambers into a tiny relief plane in the Andaman and Nicobar Islands, just six days after the 2004 tsunami devastated the area, he finds himself next to a loud, officious-seeming, irascible man in a safari suit, his hair carefully oiled. The visiting writer tries to sidle away, but soon his obstreperous neighbor is sharing his complaints with him. Only as they continue talking does Ghosh begin to realize that the man is, in fact, an epidemiologist, and has lost his wife, his daughter, the whole careful life he has built up, in the tragedy. The loudness...
...three IQ points smarter by the end of one of his novels. And with his passion for subjects like marine biology, Ghosh remains his nation's best hope when it comes to getting tens of thousands of fiction-glutted Indians to read something mind broadening. The next announcement by Amitav Ghosh that he has a new novel to present to his countrymen?with multitudes of unexpected data tucked inside, ready to overwhelm even the most information-resistant reader with a sense of the magic of facts?will rank as the most important event in India's literary calendar that year...
...writing fiction that gets read in America and England, a disproportionate amount of the informative and scholarly work on India still gets outsourced to Americans and Britons. The sovereign obsession of middle-class India, it would seem, is to be entertained, not to be informed. And that is why Amitav Ghosh might well be the most important Indian novelist writing in English today...