Word: peacocking
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...partiers follow an organized caravan called a "band" that they have already registered with and chosen a costume from. Some outfits tend to be conservative, like the simple cotton sailor suits worn by one group. Others have elaborate sky-high headdresses and makeshift tails made of feathers that a peacock would envy. But by far the most noticeable are the decorated bikinis worn by the beauty queens - which leave just enough to the imagination. Of course, it simply isn't enough to just watch; being a person of action, I felt the need to don a costume, as part...
...perhaps not surprising that Sujit Saraf chose Chandni Chowk as the main setting for his ambitious 750-page novel of politics, commerce and manners in modern India. The Peacock Throne does for Delhi and democracy what Vikram Chandra's recent 900-page Sacred Games does for Mumbai (formerly Bombay) and organized crime. Or what 19th century European novelists did when economic and intellectual winds howled: produce teeming, sprawling, barn-burning novels that try to describe everything in sight. The surprise is that Saraf is not, strictly speaking, a novelist. He works full-time as a space scientist...
There is nothing offhand about The Peacock Throne, named after the Red Fort seat from which the 17th century Mughal Emperor Shah Jahan held sway over all Hindustan. Saraf casts a scientist's eye on the country of his birth and finds it still preoccupied with holding sway. He starts with Indira Gandhi's 1984 assassination by Sikh bodyguards and the spasm of anti-Sikh violence that ensued. Kartar Singh, a Sikh who runs a Chandni Chowk appliance store, narrowly escapes death in the rioting - and leverages that experience to gain influence in a Hindu nationalist party...
...missions at Lockheed Martin. Evenings, he runs Naatak, a theater company he co-founded in 1995 to produce plays and movies, some of which he writes and acts in, for Silicon Valley's large South Asian population. A first novel published in India sank like a samosa, but The Peacock Throne is on several hot-new-books lists in the U.K. A French edition will appear next year, and a U.S. sale is imminent. "I'm now working on a fictionalized biography of my great-grandfather, a merchant from Bihar who journeyed to East Bengal and accumulated a large family...
...soon as they entered the Peacock Room - and maybe posed for a quick photograph with Dentsu CEO Takeo Mataki, who manned his position like a shopping mall Santa - it was straight to the food tables. There was the sushi counter catered by one of the finest restaurants in the capital. There was the grill manned by chefs who wielded steak knives like samurai. And there was the fugu - the poisonous blowfish delicacy that can cost your life if prepared incorrectly, and which can cost you $50 or more when ordered at a restaurant. I braved the fugu sashimi...