Authors
New Lights: Gary Shteyngart, Akhil Sharma, Olga Grushin, Alexander Hemon, Haruki Murakami
UK: Jane Austen, Virginia Woolf, George Eliot (Mary Ann Evans), Somerset Maugham (Of Human Bondage), William Shakespeare, Bronte sisters, Alexander Mccall Smith, Thomas Hardy, Rudyard Kipling (Kim), George Bernard Shaw (Animal Farm), Kazuo Ishiguro, Graham Greene, John le Carré, D. H. Lawrence, Rebecca West, V.S. Naipaul (only for Biswas and Guerrillas), E. M. Forster
Russian: Leo Tolstoy, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Nicholai Gogol, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Vladimir Nabokov, Vladimir Mayakovsky
US: Francis Scott Fitzgerald, Kurt Vonnegut, Theodore Dreiser, David Remnick, Henry James, Maya Angelou, John Cheever, James Baldwin, Ralph Ellison, Charles Dickinson
Latin America: Mario Vargas Llosa, Carlos Fuentes, Isabel Allende, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Jorge Luis Borges
Indian: Salman Rushdie (now UK), Ved Mehta (now US), Rabindranath Tagore, R.K. Narayanan, Amartya Sen (now US), Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni (now US), Anita Desai (In Custody), Mahadevi Varma
The rest: Naguib Mahfouz, Orhan Pamuk, Albert Camus, J.M. Coetzee, Doris Lessing, Henrik Ibsen, Sadat Hasan Manto, Abdelrahman Munif, Liam O’Flaherty, Thomas Mann, Johann Goethe, Gunter Grass, James Joyce (Dubliners), Camilo José Cela, Alice Munro, Franz Kafka
Non Fiction: Karl Marx, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Jurgen Habermas, David Remnick, Robert Fisk, Michael Taussig, Ben Orlove, Noam Chomsky, Ryszard Kapuscinski, Michael Schudson, Anthony Lewis
Graphical Novel: Art Spiegelman (Maus)
Artists
Rembrandt Harmenszoon van Rijn, Johannes Vermeer, Claude Monet, Wassily Kandinsky, Henri Matisse, Vincent Van Gogh, Paul Cézanne, Francisco Goya, John Singer Sargent, Diego Velasquez, Edward Hopper, Tiziano Vecelli (Titian), Gustav Klimt, Georgia O’Keeffe, Amrita Pritam, Andy Warhol, Edgar Degas
Contemporary Artists: Saira Wasim, Brian Jungen, Ashok Sukumaran, Damien Hirst, Banksy, Gerhard Richter, Marcel Duchamp
Music:
Gotan Project, Amy Winehouse, Norah Jones, Ali Farka Toure, Cheb Khaled, Nusrat Fateh Ali, Bach, Mohammed Rafi, Celia Cruz, Lauren Hill, Fela Kuti, Lynda Lymay, Alain Souchon, Wynton Marsalis
Movies:
Ikiru, Raise the Red Lantern, Raging Bull, Brazil, Reservoir Dogs, Lawrence of Arabia, ¿Qué he hecho yo para merecer esto!!, Amores Perros, 21 Grams, Gosford Park, 28 Days Later, Bourne Identity, Orfeu Negro, Station Agent, Ten, Before Sunset, Cidade de Deus, Apocalypse Now, In Custody, Shakespeare Wallah, A Clockwork Orange, Dr. Strangelove, Little Miss Sunshine, The Battle of Algiers, Pan’s Labyrinth, Motorcycle Diaries, The Secret of the Grain, Chungking Express
Indian: Umrao Jaan(old), Shatranj Ke Khilari, Saraansh, Jaane Bhi Do Yaaro, Golmaal(old), Bawarchi, Anand, Silsila, Gaman, Pyaasa, Ankur, Omkara, Maqbool
Naming Names: Directors and Producers Merchant-Ivory Productions, Stanley Kubrick, Robert Altman, Kar Wai Wong, Zhang Yimou, Mohsen Makhmalbaf, Alfonso Cuaron, Alejandro González Iñárritu, Akira Kurosawa, Satyajit Ray, Shyam Benegal, Hrishikesh Mukherjee, Werner Herzog
Naming Names: Actors Emma Thompson
**************************
*##################*****
Stay away from -
Vikram Seth: A suitable boy – a bureaucratic novel, charmless, inane
Zadie Smith: On Beauty: Easy efficient caricatures
Jhumpa Lahiri: Mediocre intellect, remarkably shallow
