Salman Rushdie & Padma Lakshmi

Rushdie’s last sigh?

In the run-up to the publication of Shalimar the Clown, Salman Rushdie’s shown once again how to stay in the news; he’s married one of the loveliest women in the world, threatened to beat up a journalist with a baseball bat and always done his best to entertain. Now the book’s out, drawing very mixed reviews, and the fun continues.

A GQ profile had the world’s luckiest-in-love writer talking about everything from comics (Batman was his favourite superhero, because he was the weirdest) and Madonna (upon being sent The Ground Beneath her Feet “not only had she not read it, she had shredded it”), to homosexuality in British boarding schools (“I missed out on some apparently essential part of the experience.”)

The curry conspiracy

As a student in the UK, I was always irritated by British ‘Indian food’; tasteless swill with strange names. I’ve lost count of the hours I’ve spent explaining to people from all over the world how curry was not a dish (let alone an entire cuisine) we’d ever heard of, but an evil imperial conspiracy to disarm culinary arsenals in the subcontinent. Curry: A Biography, the non-fiction book by Lizzie Collingham currently making waves in the UK, talks about the same thing from a slightly less rabid perspective. The book traces the paths by which various ingredients of famous dishes travelled all over the world over the years to unite to form various dishes, mapping the richness and diversity of the food we so fiercely claim as our own. The Hobson-Jobson entry for ‘curry’ starts off with Tamil etymology, and concludes, with typical quirkiness, with Richard the Lionheart.

Why do nice girls always end up with pigs? Model-actress Sushama Reddy has a porcine fetish, which manifests itself in the form of piggy soft toys, soaps, figurines and so on. She doesn’t have a live one yet, so do apply.

Between judges

Indian TV producers have got it all wrong. On reality/contest shows like Indian Idol/ Fame Gurukul, they focus on feuds between contestants. The real fights in Indian music happen between stars, not aspirants. Case in point: judges Aadesh Shrivastava and Ismail Durbar hurling invectives at each other on Zee’s Sa Re Ga Ma Pa Challenge.

Aishwarya Rai

Ash you like it

Aishwarya Rai as a Byzantine warrior princess? Surely they’re kidding? Apparently not. Clearly Rai’s soul-stirring, gut-wrenching martial speeches about cultural tourism and arranged marriages in Bride and Prejudice have convinced Hollywood she’s a new-age, culture-rich, convent-educated Xena ? and so they’ve cast her in the $70 million Last Legion, also starring Colin Firth (who I can’t imagine holding a sword) and Ben Kingsley. Another elephant-kick in the face for her critics, and another pit-stop in the procession of the all-conquering Ash juggernaut, but one question remains ? sure, she’s beautiful, popular and hugely talented, but can she kick butt in a toga?

AWARD OF THE WEEK

To London Zoo, for a new exhibition, The Human Zoo, which features eight humans, dressed in little more than fig leaves, listening to music. That’s science project and powerful social allegory all in one.