Samanth Subramanian

In Outlook this week, Mitali Saran reviews Following Fish, and she has the best of all possible quibbles — she wishes it wasn’t so short:

Subramanian’s sensibility is that of the textbook journalist—curious and empathetic, but unsentimental. His prose, however, is elegant, gently funny, and filled with startling images—from mussels that “looked like giant spiders that had waded heroically through batter only to then accidentally fall into hot coconut oil” to the associations of said oil with a hair product: “somehow it smelled very familiar and yet very wrong, as if someone had decided to make tea with Head & Shoulders or salad dressing out of Brylcreem”. He has a gift for evocative phrases (“the dry logic of capitalism”) and for offbeat insights such as “the ability to dine out alone, however, seems to be like the ability to curl your tongue—either you have it or you don’t.”

More here.

Also an earlier review that I hadn’t linked to, on my friend Tara’s wonderfully spunky web site Mumbai Boss, is here.

The book has, happily, gone into reprint, so stores should have it back in stock soon. I believe, however, that you can continue to order from IndiaPlaza and FlipKart.