RecommendedReads | Who wants to be attractive?

Happy Valentine's Day and all! For those of you who are wondering how to make yourselves more attractive by 9pm tonight, a new translation of the Kama Sutra has a solution: "A paste of rosebay, wild ginger and plum leaves can make one seductive. So can a salve for the eyes made by grinding these same herbs, putting the powder on a wick and burning it with myrobalan oil in a human skull."
Read a more excerpts from the book on thehairpin.com or buy it from Amazon.com for the whole hog this Valentine's Day. A special prize shall go out to the reader who reviews the book for us by Feb 29. Two special prizes if you can wing it by the end of this week.

Now that you're a tad closer to scoring tonight, here's something you might find handy in taking the conversation beyond the run-of-the-mill "Are those eyelashes real?" The Jaipur Literature Festival may be old news in a world of ADD inducing sources that create a hype about something and then abandon them for the next one much like roosters on heat. But here's a column written around that time you might have missed in the headlines that were dominated by Rushdie and Oprah. This piece in The New York Times by Manu Joseph, author of Serious Men and editor of Open Magazine, talks about the world of publishing and the quality of Indian English literature in relation to the the hype that surrounds its authors. It's not time or event specific so you must read it if you haven't already.

In other, more current news, a book that I'm personally itching to read Narcopolis by Jeet Thayil is on stands now. The name does sound intriguing, doesn't it? The plot, even more so. Juxtapose that with reality and we might just have a book club discussing Opium in the time of a serial killer who smashes your head in with a stone. For an interesting take on Narcopolis, you might want to read what this columnist for Mumbai Boss has to say.