I wrote The Book of Answers kicking and screaming that I was not really an author of any kind. As many have shredded it as exalted it. Many have given up quarter way through the tome, though at least two have read it twice. To this day, I find it impossible to read it as though I had not written it; I grope like a blind man for a glimmering of its worth and readability.
When people talk about The Book of Answers, there is a frowning fellow inside me, who dismisses it all as merely one person’s view. I know I’ll never know whether it is a good read or a poor one.
The US’s Transportation Security Authority has spent 57 billion dollars to catch potential terrorists as they step off the plane since the 9/11 terrorist attacks. To date, it has caught zero terrorists. But C Y Gopinath falls into their net every time.
The urban Indian lives daily life in a state of barely suppressed road rage, and the violent honking of horns on every road is only one manifestation of that. Interruptions of any kind ignite instant anger; nothing is tolerated that could come between today’s Indian and the success and wealth that awaits him.
A simple question about diabetes on a flight to Bangladesh leads to the story of “the largest mass poisoning in history” — arsenic in Bangladesh’s drinking water. And the role that two well-meaning donor agencies played in it. 
The Book of Answers has been in the market since about July 5. Within 10 days, I received word that it was on the best-seller lists. You know me. I tweeted it all over the planet immediately and leaked the word into Facebook. Congratulations poured in from far and wide. Everyone apparently knew I had [...]
“I was totally struck by the quality of his writing,” said Mani Shankar. He then proceeded to read slowly and with apparent relish two paragraphs from the random chapter that had taken his fancy, pausing to savor choice phrases. When he was done reading it, he read it all over again, this time pausing at expressions he liked — skeptical alleys, daytime children of evening mothers, the clinic’s lurid curtain that the ceiling fan blew up every few minutes like Marilyn Monroe’s skirt. July 1, 2011, Bangkok: At 6.30 pm on July 5, 2011, at the Casuarina hall in New Delhi’s Habitat Centre, the Book of Answers will be officially released to the general public in a publishing ritual that usually lasts about two hours. Mr Mani Shankar Iyer, popular and plain-spoken diplomat, journalist, and political and social [...]
