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Literary Review
Decline and fall
ANOTHER literary "magazine", according to insiders, has bitten the dust. Tehelka.com, when it had time off its little cameras and briefcases, ran a literary "channel" that could come up with surprises. In the couple of years of its life it provided room for a variety of writing that the print media could not. Long essays, fragments from autobiographies, poetry, short stories and, to pull in the hordes, erotic writing. It roped in writers like Dilip Chitre, Kiran Nagarkar, Amit Chaudhuri and even the celebrity feminist Germaine Greer.
It also started a publishing imprint called Buffalo Books, with a book on match-fixing by Manoj Prabhakar. No one remembers that book or Manoj Prabhakar, and the website itself is supposedly to become history. Its staff, 150 or so at its peak, has been massively downsized and the unfortunate few who remain are scanning employment columns.
Buffalo Books (called Naipaul Inc. by some) has published two more titles, one by Seerpersaud Naipaul, the other on V.S Naipaul. We hope the area of utter darkness will not spread to cloak Tehelka's publishing end as well, and that it will stay alive with the printed bark sans byte.
ANURADHA ROY
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