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Three brilliant speakers. One exceptional book (details here ).  Please save the date, be there!

SUDIPTA KAVIRAJ ‘Tannoy’ is not a word you’d expect to encounter in an academic essay. If the essay is by a Bengali academic, you might think it a typo for ‘Tanmoy’, or a misspelling of ‘to annoy’. Tannoy is not even a word that most people know: in fact those short of forty are quite likely never to have heard it. Like xerox and frigidaire, it began life as a manufacturing corporation and was driven by the singularity of its success into becoming a common noun—or, according to Wikipedia, a genericized trademark term for a public address system. Given the number and loudness of tannoys in India,   the nearness of the word with ‘to annoy’ seems serendipitous and might have excited Saussure no end. But we only know for a fact that it once excited a happy memory in Sudipta Kaviraj, for it features in an academic essay by him entitled ‘ Reading A Song of the City: Images of the City in Literature and Films’. The dry intellectual march of the standard aca...

THIS BEAUTY has just been whipped off to the printer. Hold your horses till it appears in the shops after a few weeks (no later than May-June 2013). Publishers heave a sigh of relief when they deliver CRC (camera ready copy) to the printer. It's the end of a long haul starting with the copy-edit, query resolution with the author, text finalization, first proofs from the typesetter, queries and typos marked by the proof-reader and author, the collation of both sets of proofs by the publisher, finalization of the CRC, the sending of index proofs to the author, receiving and typesetting the index, checking everything once before dispatching it to the printer, crossing fingers and toes and sending the bugger off to be printed. And then some oddbats complain books cost too much (usually those that buy diamonds and pay thousands for home-delivered pizzas). Subrahmanyam's latest is, as already outlined in an earlier blogpost , one of the most readable thi...