Time Magazine Has Blundered And How!

Time's Asia edition in its issue dated June 19, 2006 carried an extensive, feel-good feature on Bombay - City of Dreams. The Bombay Shining story was authored by Mr. Alex Perry - Time's South Asia correspondent stationed in India. This eminent journalist specializes in a clever turning of phrases, with an unsettling tendency to go to either extreme in his analysis.

To the uninitiated, Mr. Perry writes in a tone that suggests that he discourses the absolute truth, and only the absolute truth. He had predicted great, glowing things about Aishwarya Rai in a 2003 cover-story on the actress, but the trailblazing career of the former Miss World is for the readers to judge.

In June 2006, Mr. Perry decided to patronize the metropolis of Bombay.

However, he has erred on his facts.

In his feature on Bombay the Time correspondent writes: 'And it's (i.e. Bombay) a highbrow haven where British-Indian novelist Vikram Seth mixed the sensibilities of Charles Dickens with a little Indian spice to make the modern classic A Suitable Boy."

Mr. Perry is entirely wrong.

A Suitable Boy is surely a 'modern Indian classic', but it was centered in a fictional town in North India called Brahmapur. A part of it takes place in cities like Calcutta and Delhi. Bombay does not figure in the 1000-pages-plus novel. I challenge him to find even a single reference of Bombay in this fist-breaking novel.

Perhaps Mr. Perry did not read the novel. Perhaps his researchers played a bit careless. Perhaps Time magazine fact-checkers had taken a mass leave. Or perhaps Mr. Perry confused Vikram Seth's novel with Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children - the only Booker of the Bookers prize winning novel whose protagonist Saleem (not Salim, please note Mr. Perry) Sinai was indeed born in the city of Bombay. To be more precise: In Dr. Narlikar's Nursing Home at the stroke of midnight on 15th August, 1947.

The estimable Mr. Perry and his prestigious Time has erred in another, equally delicate, aspect. The essence of A Suitable Boy has been compared to the admittedly creative metaphor of mixing the 'sensibilities of Charles Dickens with a little Indian spice'.

There can be nothing more sinful.

A Suitable Boy can actually be interpreted as Jane Austen in India. Definitely, no Dickensian mood can be attached to the novel.

Perhaps, here again Mr. Perry confused Vikram Seth with Salman Rushdie, and A Suitable Boy with Midnight's Children.

Interestingly, in an 2006 essay in The Times, commemorating the 25th publication of Midnight's Children, the creator of Saleem Sinai had generously thanked the creator of Oliver Twist. Rushdie was grateful to 'Dickens for his great, rotting, Bombay-like city (i.e. London), and his ability to root his larger-than-life characters and surrealist imagery in a sharply observed, almost hyper-realistic background, out of which the comic and fantastic elements of his work seemed to grow organically, becoming intensification of, and not escapes from, the real world.

Could Mr. Perry be thinking Midnight's Children, and typing A Suitable Boy on his keyboard? A tragedy of errors? An accident?

Both Jane Austen and Charles Dickens were great authors but they wrote about two entirely different worlds. To any book lover, linking the Jane-Austenish A Suitable Boy to Charles Dickens appears as a crime not to be pardoned.

Mr. Alex Perry, and the Time Magazine, must apologize.