Word: throned
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...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...
...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 and great...
...terrorism on June 28 that began the crisis. At first it seemed like just another assassination in just another Muslim country (Bosnia-Herzegovina, occupied by Austria-Hungary only a few years before). And although the terrorists scored a big hit (Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir to the Austrian throne), the financial markets took it in their stride. Stocks barely moved...
...different priorities in many respects from those of Summers," says Ryan, who was one of the president’s most ardent critics throughout last year’s tumult. "I don’t think that anyone really feels that he was part of the power behind the throne that then didn’t work...