T.G. Vaidyanathan, TGV to his friends and students alike, taught literature and film criticism, played first-class cricket and thought the world was his subject. This book collects some of his best writings on literature, culture, film and cricket. In his essays on literature and culture, TGV displays his remarkable ability to take an apparently insignificant fact and use it to highlight matters of wider cultural import. From dictionaries to umbrellas to the stainless steel culture sweeping Madras, here is a truly eclectic selection of subjects. Each piece is imbued with TGV’s unique brand of intellectual energy that combines wide-ranging references with a rigorous attention to detail. ‘Memoirs of a Bibliophile’, a delightful journey through the world of second-hand bookshops, will find echoes in all book-lovers. Films were for him ‘secret odes to life’, and his approach to them is refreshingly unorthodox whether he writes about Monsoon Wedding or On the Waterfront. His essays on cricket are both a riotous celebration of the game and its heroes and a celebration of the people he shared this love with. His cricket writing is full of literary echoes and his heroes are Cardus and Wodehouse. The essay ‘Authority and Identity in India’, available in India for the first time in this volume, looks at the Indian psyche using tools as varied as epics, popular culture and sports. Along with the tributes written specially for this volume, the essays reveal TGV the man: a person whose closest friendships were forged by arguments, especially over cinema, of a mind constantly alert and questing and quite without cynicism, and a teacher who could equally inspire and exasperate but who believed that dialogue was crucial. Brilliant, eccentric, original and thought provoking, this book is certain to entertain and educate.
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