Author: T G Vaidyanathan
Publisher: Penguin
Year: 2003
Language: English
Pages: 261
ISBN/UPC (if available): 014302955X
Description
T G Vaidyanathan, TGV to his friends and students alike, taught literature and film criticism, played first-division cricket and thought the world was his subject. This book collects some of his best writings on literature, culture, film and cricket.
In his essays on literature and culture, TGV displays his remarkable ability to take an apparently insignificant fact and use it to highlight matters of wider cultural import. From dictionaries to umbrellas to the stainless steel culture sweeping Madras, here is a truly eclectic selection of subjects. Each piece is imbued with TGV’s unique brand of intellectual energy that combines wide-ranging references with a rigorous attention to detail.
Memoirs of a Bibliophile, a delightful journey through the word of second-hand bookshops, will find echoes in all book-lovers. Films were for him secret odes to life, and his approach to them is refreshingly unorthodox whether he writes about Monsoon Wedding or On the Waterfront. His essays on cricket are both a riotous celebration of the game and its heroes and a celebration of the people he shared this love with. His cricket writing is full of literary echoes and his heroes are Cardus and Wodehouse. The essay Authority and Identity in India, available in India for the first time in this volume, looks at the Indian psyche using tools as varied as the epics, popular culture and sports.
Along with the tributes written specially for this volume, the essays reveal TGV the man: a person whose closest friendships were forged by arguments, especially over cinema, of a mind constantly alert and questing and quite without cynicism, and a teacher who could equally inspire and exasperate but who believed that dialogue was crucial.
Brilliant, eccentric, Original and thought provoking, this book is certain to entertain and educate.
Contents
Foreword by Ram Guha
Introduction
NO CONTEST
Clean Bowled
Chepauk all the way
The Glory of the Game
No Contest
The Americanization of Indian Cricket
Cricket in Kurukshetra
Well Played, Wodehouse!
Cardus and his Kingdom
Requiem for Larwood
Keating in Paradise
Mayhem at Midnight
FROM KISS KISS TO BANG GANG
From Kiss Kiss to Bang Bang
Who Killed Her?
Love and Trembling in Darr
Sivaji Ganesan: Chevalier Extraordinaire
Fata is Beautiful
A Divided World
Shatranj Ke Khiladi (1977)
THE ROMANCE OF ENGLISH PROSE
Naipaul’s mea culpa
Mr Naipaul’s Round Trip
The Writer’s Writer
Dialogue with Death
Are Dictionaries Relevant?
The Romance of English Prose
Memoirs of a Bibliophile
The Legacy of Wittgenstein
The Epic Battle of Stalingrad
THE INDIAN APPROACH TO PSYCHOANALYSIS
Authority and Identity in India
The Indian Approach to Psychoanalysis
UMBRELLA DAYS
The Stainless Steel Culture
Umbrella Days
Of Marriages and Upanayanams
The Making of a Scientist
THE MAN WHO TALKED
A Rare Intellectual
Nirmala Lakshman
Enlightened Scholar
Ashis and Uma Nandy
The Man Who Talked
C K Meena
Playboy of the Eastern World
Chandra Siddan
Intellectual Charmer
Sudhir Kakar