JK Rowling has killed children's literature

So says the editor of Open magazine, Sandipan Deb. And he makes a pretty good (adult) case for his views.

Here's an excerpt from his March 6 post:

Do children read anything else anymore? No. Their heads are inhabited completely by worlds unlike the one they live in. They will never read David Copperfield, Sherlock Holmes bores them, and they will never even know Holden Caulfield because the back cover does not carry a blurb.

Read the full article here.

And read the comments too, especially the ones purportedly from children. Here's one:

Dear older uncle,

Why are you adding IIT-let's-commit-suicide-and-IIM-let's-screw-up-an-online-exam details to your profile? We kids hate when people roam around with those tags and expect us to emulate them.

And we love reading and studying. Just that we don't want to lock ourselves up, and spend 4 years on coaching classes trying to make it to institutions. Sad, Rowling was not in your day and age, else you would have known that Journalism was your calling and wouldn't have wasted money on seats which would have been used elsewhere.

if you are so happy and glad at being a journo, why sport that tag of IIT-IIM. Is that to tell us that we should not mess with you? Or that we are scumbags?

Nice rant against fantasy fiction. This was a reality rant for you. Grow up while you can. I hope I killed your fantasy highly educated world for you.

6 APRIL 2010 | AYESHA FAHAL

• Thanks to Anjali Muthanna for the tip-off.

The angry young woman

Arundhati Roy went to meet the Maoists in Chhattisgarh recently and wrote a long (thousands of words) essay for Outlook. Read the essay here.

And then read a critique of the essay by Salil Tripathi in Mint:

"Maoists have killed many and manipulated many more. Their latest victim is Arundhati Roy, who uses her gift of writing vivid prose to clothe their trite claims with poetic adornment. She equates their cynical quest for power with the genuine demands, rights and concerns of the people who live in the forests. She gives new meaning to the binary logic of 'us or them', something she ridiculed when George W. Bush used it. Without having been the Maoists’ hostage, Roy has caught the bug called the Stockholm Syndrome."

Read the full column here.

The angry old man

"Amitabh Bachchan has the right to speak out, but we expect more from our greatest icon." Thus writes Sidharth Bhatia in Mint.

Why is Amitabh lashing out on his blog at his critics? Has he become too touchy? Read Bhatia's thought-provoking opinion piece here.