11.15 pm, Thursday
Dear Diary,
I am miffed. Not without valid reason. Yet another Indi-blogger is hand-picked to write a book. It is a fiction about the job and love life of some Malayali guy in Mumbai. Must be a real dork! HeHe!

Well known thinker and human rights activist Rajni Kothari is the doyen of Indian political science. A prolific writer, during the last 50 years he has published nearly 20 books and hundreds of articles on various aspects of Indian politics, democracy, human rights, poverty etc.

For Israeli author Judith Rotem, who has made her first passage to India and was in New Delhi recently, writing is like shedding light on the dark sides of the world. "Darkness is all over," she says. The darkness she is talking about is both of our mind and our soul. Born in Budapest, Rotem, who spent several months in Bergen-Belsen, before she was taken on the Kastner train to a refugee camp in Switzerland and finally to pre-state Israel in 1945, has seen enough darkness. "The Holocaust shaped me in a deep way," says the author, whose life had altered in many ways as her family was "uprooted", having to start from the scratch in Israel. "We were rich in Hungary, but when we came to Israel, we had nothing," she says.

Theravada, “the teaching of the elders” or “the ancient teaching”, the oldest surviving Buddhist school — founded in India and considered to be relatively conservative, and generally closest to early Buddhism — has, for many centuries, been the predominant religion of Sri Lanka, accounting for about 70 per cent of the population.

Chetan Bhagat, IITian and IIM alumnus, has come up with yet another blockbuster in his 2 States: The Story of My Marriage. His two in-between books after the 2004 debut novel Five-Point Someone may have been unreadable, but this is his "comeback". Like all his titles, this too has a number in it. Maybe he’s been told that numbers are the key to his success.

The Adventure of the Missing Dancing Girl is a story of four young, energetic children, who get entangled in an amazing adventure. Set in the year 2500 BC, the book traces the escapade of Kartik, Kaveri, Xerxes and Namami at the auspicious Surya Mela, all the way from their home in the small village of Anantpur.

Music informed much of what the Nobel laureate Rabindranath Tagore wrote. A new biography of Gurudev, Rabindranath Tagore: The Singer And His Song by Reba Som, published by Penguin Books, has music as its leitmotif. Music, held Tagore, fills infinite between two souls. His songs mirrored what he went through personally — his disenchantment with the freedom movement, his grief when the young members of his family died and the sense of devastation he felt after the suicide of the woman he loved.

Om Puri may not be an unsung hero in showbiz, but an unlikely one definitely. The uncharted chapters of his journey and the closely-guarded alcoves of his private life find their way in Unlikely Hero: Om Puri, a befitting salute to a callow greenhorn from Punjab who went on to become one of the finest actors in the Indian film industry. The biography is not a typical rags-to-riches story, but a touching tale of reality tasselled to a fanciful end of feat, fealty and felicity.

This search for Sita began near the botanical gardens in Peradiniya, Sri Lanka, on a day redolent with the breeze of spring. As I absorbed the lush landscape, the swaying palms, the feather-leaved bamboo, the Java willows, I thought I saw her, sitting on a rock, perhaps an apparition from a Raja Ravi Varma painting.

The drive to meet William Dalrymple at his Mehrauli farmhouse is like going to meet a reclusive maharaja. It’s a long, dusty, rickety ride on a road that seems headed nowhere.