I’m sure this is happening to many, many freelance writers these days.  As print pages shrink, stories that are not killed are becoming orphans, lucky to land online.  My final review for the Toronto Star’s Desi Life, Minal Hajratwala’s Leaving India: My Family’s Journey from Five Villages to Five Continents has survived the cancellation of the magazine and is now on the Web.    

Here’s an excerpt:

If there is a genre that gets little respect, it is the story of the second generation revisiting the motherland, trying to understand what compelled their parents to leave in the first place. San Francisco-based journalist, poet and activist Minal Hajratwala takes this convention and turns it on its head by telling the story of the modern global family in Leaving India: My Family’s Journey from Five Villages to Five Continents.

I wonder where I will stand with them now that my review of Doniger’s The Hindus: An Alternative History is posted on the Globe & Mail website.  Here is an excerpt from the review:

Many Hindus live in a sort of religious hyper-vigilance, like post-traumatic stress disorder survivors, waiting for the next attack. The trauma was the British colonial experience, where their religion was seen as merely a grotesque series of idols. Abolitionist William Wilberforce was not alone in thinking Hinduism “mean, licentious and cruel.” Like Sita, the heroine of the Ramayana who must prove her purity to her husband Rama many times, Hinduism is constantly under trial.

It is to this maelstrom that Doniger brings her skeptic’s eye, more interested in what can be teased out of stories than revelation as a fact. She is careful to state frequently that readers who are expecting a thorough understanding of Hinduism as a living faith should look elsewhere. Her agenda, she explains, is different: “It’s not all about Brahmins, Sanskrit, the [Bhagavad] Gita.”

The Globe and Mail review is the first in Canada, following Pankaj Mishra in the New York Times and Michael Dirda in the Washington Post (a very short excerpt from The Hindus is also on the WaPo site as well as blog posting by Doniger, ‘The Battle over Hindu History’).  

Arthur Dewdney has, in turn, reviewed Mishra and Dirda on the SAJA Forum (he criticizes Mishra for writing a ‘hodgepodge’ of a three graf intro; I disagree, his intro with its E.M Forster reference is meant to entice NYT readers to not skip over his review).  Another worthwhile discussion took place on Chapati Mystery, which was surprisingly followed up by a response from Doniger herself.

However, I think the really interesting reviews are yet to come when the book is released in India.

More reviews:  Tunku Varadarajan in The Wall Street Journal, Sandip Roy in The San Francisco Chronicle.

Why would I have to tweet if I sat at my computer all day and had already mastered the Facebook status update?

Well, I can proudly declare that I am one of the sheep who has recently joined twitter – if US Senators can tweet during a Presidentail Address, then really, the band wagon left a long time ago.  (Psst, there are no rules in Web 3.0, mixed metaphors are encouraged.)

There is a certain freedom in 140 characters, which is thankfully longer than a newspaper headline, (now that I think about it, no one uses *which* in twitterland).  It’s like a writing warm-up exercise except that you can waste away hours reading other people’s homework. 

Unfortunately for me, this post shows an indecent reverence for old-school writing with nary a hyperlink, a brachiasaurus let loose in a post-Battlestar Galactica finale.

To correct this, I will refer to the Philip Moscovitch Globe and Mail story about twitterature.  (Of course, this link will only work for umpteen days, then the story will disappear behind the Globe firewall – so I really need to link to a blogger according to protocol.)  While PM writes about two people, I chose to highlight one.  The Canadian one who is not only mentioned first, he also happens to be Bengali like me.  (Got a problem with that?  Then leave a comment, but no  bile please.  I believe comments should be bile-free.)

Arjun Basu may be Canada’s most prolific author.

Since November, the Montreal-based writer has produced some 500 short stories. But this is short fiction with a twist: Follow @arjunbasu on Twitter and you’ll be reading lots and lots of very short stories — all exactly 140 characters long.

“It started as a lark and relatively quickly became something I was mildly obsessed with,” says Basu, the editorial director for custom publisher Spafax and author of last year’s short story collection Squishy.

Arjun Basu calls his tweeted stories - Twisters.  A few examples from @ArjunBasu must follow:

When he’d had too many drinks he’d reminisce about his youth and belt out Karma Chameleon before getting thrown out of some hipster dive bar

When the guests had gone, he surveyed the room. He felt panic, then resignation. There was nothing he could do to save her precious flowers.

We all know a book of tweets is in the works, if not Basu’s then someone else’s. 

And for every book hopefully, but not always, comes a review.  What better place to mention a story from the National Post’s book blog Afterword:

Erin Balser is the founder of Books in 140, the popular Twitter feed in which a book is reviewed in 140 characters. By day, she works in the marketing department of the University of Toronto Press. The 24-year-old East Coast transplant exchanged e-mails with the Post‘s Mark Medley about the difficulties of short reviews, the site’s popularity, and the future of publishing.

The Afterword: Where did the idea for Books in 140 come from?

Erin Balser: I wanted to use social media — Facebook, my blog, Twitter, etc — as a space to better participate in the book community and validate the
ridiculous amounts of reading I do, but I couldn’t think of an original angle to approach them from. I had started to use Twitter as a means of networking and connecting professionally when it came to me — Twitter could give me the originality I was looking for while participating in the always-growing online literature community.

The circle of reading is complete.   

So who am I to complain when my copy gets truncated and I lose a paragraph out of a tightly argued review because of space restrications?  My review of historian Ayesha Jalal’s Partisans of Allah: Jihad in South Asia in Desi Life fell prey to that predicament. 

Now I may miss the following lines,

What makes this book fascinating is Jalal’s ability to show how the ideas around jihad were continually shifting.  An early reformer like Shah Waliullah may have inspired a jihad against the Sikhs in 1826, but half a century later, the founder of Aligarh University, Sayyid Ahmad Khan, was more interested in an educational jihad for his co-religionists than armed insurrection against the British. 

 But obviously someone else thought it unnecessary.  Maybe they were right, but I’d like to think the opposite.

SAJA Toronto invited senior journalists from the city’s diverse newsrooms to share their views on writing stories that often dealt with ethnic minorities, and aired dirty laundry.

Freelance writer Mary Rogan spoke about choosing words carefully for her Toronto Life cover story on the murder of Aqsa Parvez, and the process of writing the story without having access to its main characters.

National Post senior reporter Stewart Bell spoke about reporting the facts while covering his beat – national security.

OMNI News – South Asian Edition anchor Angie Seth elaborated on how the community news show strives to achieve balance, while also fulfilling demands of reflecting Canada.

Midweek Toronto publisher Yudhvir Jaswal shared his views on the community’s responsibility to accept stories that are deemed ‘negative,’ rather than clamouring for more ‘positive’ stories.

CBC Radio producer Naheed Mustafa addressed issues such as the lack of diversity in the newsroom, leading some journalists of ethnic heritage to become de-facto experts on an ethnic/religious community.