1. William Dalrymple slams Sir V.S. Naipaul’s jaundiced view on Indian history. Farrukh Dhondy asks: "Does Willy get it wilfully wrong?"
2. Sohail Hashmi asks Pavan K. Verma how a printer’s devil could turn a shroud into a casket in his book on Kaifi Azmi.
3. Ramachandra Guha charges Boria Mazumdar with plagiarising his 1998 Palwankar Baloo story. "No," says Mazumdar.
4. Patrick French rips into Mahatma Gandhi’s advocacy of hip-baths as a cure for vaginal discharge in Liberty or Death.
5. Arundhati Roy calls big dams WMDs to control people. B.G. Verghese says the poetry was charming, the facts wrong.
6. Sanjay Subrahmanyam tells Ashis Nandy & co that secularism is as Indian as ‘preponed’ and ‘denting’.
7. Christopher Hitchens attracts readers’ ire for declaring Mother Teresa’s work on earth "a large net-minus".
8. William Dalrymple and Ramachandra Guha slug it out over who is an authority on India: mofussil or diasporic writers.
9. Pankaj Mishra attacks Salman Rushdie’s "empty bombast" and receives a rocket from the master.
10. Anupam Kher takes umbrage at Arundhati Roy’s post-Pokhran essay appearing in British papers.
10 People We Took Out For Lunch (at our expense)
| Amitabh Bachchan | Tina Ambani |
| M.F. Husain | John Abraham |
| Raveena Tandon | Vivek Oberoi |
| Sharmila Tagore | Dom Moraes |
| Antara Mali | Kiran Bedi |
