What are words worth?

It's a quarter past five and I walk sleepily into the kitchen, my hand reaches for the medium-sized coffee filter and I not-so-precisely measure five heaping spoons of fresh grounds into it and with the other half of my brain pull out the milk to boil. I put away last night's clean and dry dishes as silently as possible, knowing the early morning stillness magnifies the sound of a tinkling spoon into something resembling cannon fire in the slumbering mind of the still-sleeping household. I watch the milk first slowly and then rapidly rise to a boil thinking of Kanthiamma, my maternal grandmother, tell me it's a good sign if the milk boils over. (Well it's done that several times over and I haven't noticed any unusual good luck coming my way.) I make my coffee and as I lift the tumbler to my lips I wonder whether it will be a "perfect coffee day". My friend Mahrookh visits my wandering mind at that moment, saying in her inimitable Tamil imitation "sari...

As I scanned my bookshelf and ticked off in my mind the books I had finished reading, it struck me that works in translation comprised about 80 percent of my list last year. I don't consciously look for translated work, other than those by writers in Indian languages (being handicapped by my relative inability to fully appreciate the written word in the Indian languages I am familiar with) but it turns out that many of the non-Indian writers I had read last year were also in translation. Allowing works of imagination (and information of course) to travel across linguistic and cultural boundaries leads to a wonderful movement of ideas, creating connections in a relatively effortless manner. Of course, I completely appreciate that the act of translation is certainly not without effort, in fact requires a special talent that is able to transfer mood and meaning to an alien language in a way that leaves no sense of a "foreign tongue" in a reader's head. The best translati...

A couple of weeks ago I came home from a book launch with a nice fat hardbound copy of the novel, Amitav Ghosh's "River of Smoke", signed by the author with an inscription to my daughter. This copy joined my set of three of Ghosh's books, each with a signature and a personal note. Then there's the signed copy of Chimamanda Adichie's "Half of a Yellow Sun" alongside Alexander McCall Smith's "No 1 Ladies' Detective Agency" with his name scrawled on the fly-leaf. Other authors have scrawled their unrecognizable or distinctive black-ink John Hancocks on other books, from Mark Tully to William Dalrymple to Kaveri Nambisan. Each of the inscriptions brings back a story of a meeting, of a specific context of experiencing the book. And I treasure them all. I know, ten or twenty years from now, when my bibliophile daughter takes over my bookshelves, she will feel the same fondness for those old volumes, maybe a bit yellowed and dog-eared, bu...