Apologies for the long silence. It isn’t as if I’ve packed up pen and paper (rather, my laptop) and gone off to vegetate somewhere. There are things happening in my world of writing; the problem is that writing takes such a long time. There’s many a month between the inception of an idea and the day the book hits the shelves… I have a book coming out probably in October 2011; this will be the sequel to The Englishman’s Cameo, and I’m currently writing the sequel to that book. So, Muzaffar Jang fans have something to look forward to – both this winter, and the next.

In addition to that, Westland-Tranquebar will be releasing a collection of my short stories – all on the theme of dark humour – probably in November 2011.

And, meanwhile, here’s another book to which I’ve contributed: The Popcorn Essayists: What Movies do to Writers. It’s an anthology of film-related writing from well-known Indian writers who don’t typically write about cinema: Manjula Padmanabhan, Sumana Roy, Amitava Kumar, Anjum Hassan and others – including me.  Published by Westland-Tranquebar, compiled and edited by Jai Arjun Singh, the book will be formally released in March 2011. It’s already available online on Flipkart, though, so if you live in India, you can order it here.

The stories in this book promise to be very interesting. If you’re a cinema buff, don’t miss this one.

Oh, and yes: an excerpt from my essay for The Popcorn Essayists: What Movies do to Writers. I contributed an article on one of my favourite themes from cinema, suspense thrillers from Hindi cinema in the 1950s and 60s. The piece is called Villains and Vamps and All Things Camp, and here’s a sneak peek:

“The spy kings also seemed to command the hottest molls and the most ingenious torture equipment. I suppose finances come into that; you can’t have Helen as a ‘secretary’ who operates a machine that slowly grills the hero over a bed of coals, when all you’re doing is running a backyard bootlegging outfit. But ooh, the spy kings, with their truckloads of dirty money! They were the ones who could afford the works: the leopard skin-hot pink satin-mirrored ceiling dens, the bars crowded with bottles of Vat 69, the hordes of henchmen clad in too-tight pants and T-shirts.

There’s something so giddily, gorgeously glorious about it all.”

Happy reading!