DORKALICIOUS
The first in a trilogy about reality-challenged MBA Robin Verghese, Dork is delightful for its good-humoured skewering of corporate life in the puzzling, yuppie-generating, highly aspirational culture of business consulting. The Sassoon library lawns, generally filled with puzzling, hippie-generating, somewhat aspirational arty types, rang with laughter as cult blogger Sidin Vadukut launched his début book. Excerpts from an interview with the author:

Who is Dork’s ideal reader?
I thought it would speak best to young readers, MBAs fresh out of school, but my major concern was really to do justice to my own mental image of Robin Verghese. I’ve been amazed at how different people have taken different things from the story, though – for many people, it’s worked as a great slice-of-life in a metro, for others it’s about a lifestyle.

How easy is it to sustain humour (the mainstay of your blog, whatay.com) at novel-length?
It’s difficult. I took a lot of shortcuts to help myself.
The diary format helped by bridging a gap with the blog format.

What can we expect from the further adventures of Robin Verghese?
Robin will not reform. He will remain a dork, and the comedy of errors will continue. The repercussions so far have been small – I want him to arrive at a point where he’s able to create international diplomatic incidents.

KAIFI AND I: MEMOIR-ABILIA
One of the literary fest’s best-attended evenings was Shabana Azmi and Nasreen Rehman’s stupendous reading from Shaukat Kaifi’s memoir, Kaifi and I. One of Indian theatre’s most compelling figures, and one half of a lifelong romance with her husband, the poet and activist Kaifi Azmi, her memoir works both on the level of a deeply personal story as well as an invaluable historical document. Rahman, who translated the book from Urdu to English, and publisher Urvashi Butalia spoke with eloquence and insight of the history of the book. Fittingly, Azmi herself seemed to turn memoirist for the evening, interspersing her reliably enthralling reading with stories of her parents.

BLAFT-OFF
Stand back, world. Thanks to Chennai-based indie publishing house Blaft, the stories of legendary Hindi crime novelist, Surendra Mohan Pathak, are now accessible to readers in English. At the launch of the second of their Pathak translations, Daylight Robbery, Prahlad Kakkar arrived to share stories of a deliciously shady schoolboy past spent devouring Hindi pulp, and the book itself took off, quite literally, in an electric toy car. Both Daylight Robbery and Blaft’s earlier Pathak release, The 65 Lakh Heist, are beautifully translated and produced, of much greater literary value than their initial appeal as hip kitsch suggests. It’s time to tune in.