Nilanjana Roy

A hundred essential books, chosen by our jury, and the reasons they should be read—and reread

Husain’s canvases, absorbent of India, were coloured by the times

Finally, it’s the fabled grime that gives street food its defining sharpness

The warm, sensitive stud has morphed into a handsome handyman but Mr Right is still a fantasy

It is relatively easy to write about remote, far-off places—Timbuktu or Ulan Bator rather than Delhi, London or Paris...

A national dish for India? Cut out the curry, the dosa has searing ambitions.

From puri-aloo to McAloo Tikki burger, from Raj to rajma, fusion to confusion, we have run the gustatory gamut.

The pen became an abstract blade. And as it slashed through the undergrowth, the vegetation kept changing.

It is the stories where human lives stray plausibly, but irrevocably, into surrealist territory, while remaining touchingly human, where Sarang is at his most powerful

In the heart of darkness, Deb finds a new set of horsemen for the apocalypse: dereliction, amnesia, corruption and apathy.

That girl, the one without the name. The one just like us. The one whose battered body stood for all the anonymous women in this country whose rapes and deaths are a footnote in the left-hand column of the newspaper...

Older and wiser, none of us want to be Modesty Blaise any more. Instead, we'll settle for making war, money and love the way she did. That should be enough.

I gave up on trying to do the Bombay scene - what was the point when it was so Delhi?

A flock of bookish birds: Restless Chattering Starlings, Feather-Brained Cuckoos, Bibulous Bulbuls, Culture Vultures, Page Three Mynah Birds digging for gossip, Greater Common Shrills, the caustic Butcher Birds...

My guests have been hooted at, had obscene gestures made at them, and showered with muck. "Really," they say nervously, retreating from verandah to main house, "it's a zoo in here."

"In my mother's house and my grandmother's house, meals came in two varieties: Indian and English. Between these two extremes, the Indian lunches and the English dinners, lay a third path: not moderate, but iconoclastic." The joint-runner up entry i