"Surender Mohan Pathak has a groove on the second finger in his right hand, having written over 268 novels in long hand with a fountain pen."
Went Christmas shopping today in Little Tokyo and came away with one for myself, a "where have you been all my life" find called The Blaft Anthology of Tamil Pulp Fiction.
That is "blaft," by the way, and not "blast," which was the way I first read it. Blaft Publications of Chennai.
The book includes several excerpts from the work of Rajesh Kumar, reputed to be the most prolific author ever, in any language, with "more than 1,250 novels and 2,000 short stories" published since 1968.
Saturday, December 19, 2009
Blaft (sic)
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4 comments:
Wow.
I'm not much of a dreamer, but the following, from one of the linked articles in Wikipedia, is very evocative:
To get hold of them, you have to shovel past the porter shouting Shalimar Express teen bajke pachpan minat pe revana hogi, wait outside the tea-stained, grimy bookshop at a railway station, holler above the din of trains for Scandal Point and slip in Rs 30 — not too bad for 300-odd pages of coarse paper on which is crammed a tale of murder, moderate lust and a sleuth.....
Buy any Sharma thriller — how about the risqué Kyunki Woh Beewiyan Badalte Thay or Aaj Qatl Ho Kay Rahega, or even Mera Beta Sabka Baap or Ek Thaparh Hindustani? — before boarding that 15.55 Shalimar Express from New Delhi railway station and you, in all probability, can finish it before you reach the author’s hometown Meerut City an hour and a half later. As the train pulls out of the station and you open Kyunki Woh Beewiyan Badalte Thay — why buy anything else? — the preface reads, “Saavdhan! Is upanyas ka ant pehley parh ke khud kay dushman na banein…. Isey silsileywaar parhein, aapkey dimagh ki kasrat hogi (Beware! Don’t flip to the end of the novel and be turn into your own enemy… Read it in the correct order and your intellect will get the workout it needs).”
Cool, thanks for the heads-up.
I've got the Blaft anthology on order...it looks too good to pass up!
I knew about lakh and crore, but didn't know this:
The Indian numbering system, used today in India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Nepal and Myanmar (Burma), is based on grouping by two decimal places, rather than the three decimal places commonplace in most parts of the world. This system of measurement introduces separators into numbers in places appropriate to the two-digit grouping. For example, 30 million (3 crore) rupees would be written as Rs.3,00,00,000, with commas at the thousand, lakh, and crore levels, instead of Rs.30,000,000.
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