The launch of Mr Khushwant Singh's book on the women in his life was attended by some of the women he talks about in the book like Ms Kamna Prasad. No speeches, no readings, a brief introduction followed by cocktails. The author, as usual, left early, around 8.30 pm, leaving his guests to make merry. This time he took care not to say or do anything that would later make things awkward for him.

Referring to Mr Ram Jethmalani's book, Big Egos, Small Men (Har-Anand), Mr Soli Sorabjee, the attorney-general, says, "The book appears to be fiction at its worst." Not a surprising response as Mr Sorabjee is one of the persons attacked in the book. Among others who are attacked is Mr A S Anand, the chief justice of India, whom Mr Jethmalani accuses, among other things, of tampering with his age on his certificate. Those who know Mr Jethmalani and Mr Anand scoff at the very idea.

The launch of Big Egos, Small Men was a big event at Mr Jethmalani's house. Former law minister Shanti Bhushan released the book. Those who spoke on the occasion were Mr Jethmalani himself (looks like he hasn't said everything he wanted to say in the book), Mr Shanti Bhushan, Mr M J Akbar and Mr Padmanabhaiah. Most politicians decided to stay away, except for Ms Maneka Gandhi, Mr Ramkrishna Hegde and Mr Shatrughan Sinha. The media was well represented, including the foreign media, which generally doesn't give much importance to book launch events here.

Mr Jethmalani as usual hogged the limelight, in this case the mike, going into the whys and wherefores of the book.

I finally managed to read through Salt and Saffron (Bloomsbury) by Ms Kamila Shamsie, a book that I had included in the listings some time back. It is a family saga by a non-resident Pakistani writer that holds one's attention for some time. Like her creator, the narrator, Aliya, oscillates between England and Pakistan, weaving a magic fabric made up of a number of stories, each more imaginative than the other. The family tree of Dard-e-Dils at the beginning of the novel is helpful, but there are so many stories, some taking off from the main plot and forming sub-groups of their own, that the reader tends to get disoriented and wonders what it is all about.

While reading Salt and Saffron, one is somehow reminded of Midnight's Children. Both novelists experiment with language in a similar way, though Ms Shamsie does not stand the English language on its head the way Mr Salman Rushdie does and tends to be a bit colonial in her somewhat explicatory descriptions. To quote: "Curly shaped jelaibees, hot and gooey, that trickled thick sweet syrup down your chin when you bit into them... triangles of fried samosas, the larger ones filled with potatoes and green chillies."

Salt and Saffron (I haven't quite figured out what the title indicates) is a good read, but does "not quite" leave a mark.

The Gin Drinkers (Harper Collins), Ms Sagarika Ghose's debut novel, was released recently. Interestingly, it had its genesis in an assignment on Dalits that Ms Ghose once did. A pre-launch talk with the novelist revealed that the gin drinkers of the novel are the brown sahibs who have been guarding the knowledge that they have received from the colonisers. To whom would this knowledge be passed on? Ms Ghose attempts to show in her novel that the Dalits are the true inheritors of this knowledge, which has been denied them for centuries. So Jai Prakash the Dalit is named the director of a high profile institution, a position for which many persons have been aspiring.

The novel reads well. The journalist's eye for detail gives a visual dimension to the descriptions and one can "see" them all: Uma, her civil servant father, Shantanu, her exotic mother, Anasuya, Dhruv, the journalist turned academic, Madhavi, the pure academic, whose decision to come back to India is significant, Pamela Sen, the retired academic, and others. Some reviewers have termed it an autobiographical novel and have tried to identify some of the characters in it. I think that way one misses much that one can otherwise appreciate in the novel. A good beginning!