Vikram Seth

On silent mode

When at a Vikram Seth launch, make sure your mobile phone doesn’t ring, because he might just stop and scold you if it does. In a valiant battle against intrusive photographers and inconsiderate attendees, Seth has been laying down firm ground rules as he travels across India promoting his new book, Two Lives ? at his Calcutta launch, he even enacted a mock reading so that photographers wouldn’t disturb the real one. But at the Mumbai launch, things spiralled out of control when Aamir Khan walked into the launch; like sharks in a feeding frenzy, photographers went berserk. But the author won the day; he quickly invited Khan on stage and demonstrated how his great-uncle, a dentist and the subject of his book, treated his patients with one arm.

On top of the world

Linguistics professor and leading critic of US foreign policy Noam Chomsky has been voted the world’s top public intellectual in an online Prospect/Foreign Policy poll. The other four great minds in the top five were writer and academic Umberto Eco, Oxford science professor Richard Dawkins, Czech playwright and revolutionary Vaclav Havel and author and pro-Iraq war polemicist Cristopher Hitchens. Chomsky’s reaction to this victory? “It was probably padded by some friends of mine.” Too bad Indian web-surfers didn’t unite for this vote; Amartya Sen, Salman Rushdie (both of whom made the top ten), Jagdish Bhagwati, Sunita Narain and Fareed Zakaria were all on the list. Insecure males might find this fact pleasing: there are no women in the list of the 10 top public intellectuals. They might not find this other fact pleasing, though: the Internet is full of insecure males.

The long and boring Karisma Kapoor child custody case might finally be off the air, praise the gods. The couple have thankfully patched up, and, in a typically inane gesture, have started a polo tournament named after their darling daughter.

 

A scene from King Kong

Out of tune

The world premiere of Peter Jackson’s much-anticipated remake of King Kong is just seven weeks away, and he’s gone and dropped LOTR composer Howard Shore from the film’s team, citing ‘creative differences’.

Jackson should then have signed up A.R. Rahman, who’s composing music for the LOTR musical, but instead he’s going with James Howard (The Sixth Sense).

Topsy turvy

The world’s favourite cartoon family, The Simpsons, has overcome all possible civilisation clashes and embraced Islam. The show will air on Arab satellite network MBC as Al Shamshoon. Homer becomes Omar and Bart turns Badr, but what’s interesting is how the show is reworked to fit Islamic sentiments; Moe’s Bar ceases to exist, the beer turns into soda, Apu’s hotdogs turn into Egyptian beef sausages and Christian, Jewish and Hindu characters undergo drastic transformations. The show’s executive producer feels that the changes mean the show isn’t really The Simpsons any more ? but Omar Shamshoon still says ‘D’oh’, so the jury’s still out.

AWARD OF THE WEEK

To magician David Copperfield, who has promised to magically impregnate a woman on stage. He’s currently on tour in Germany, performing an Intimate Evening of Grand Illusion. The name clearly fits.