This is Manjula Padmanabhan reviewing Binoo John's book Entry from Backside Only in Outlook - The Hazaar Fundas of Indian English (Frown Jewels: outlookindia.com). Excerpt:
"With a journalist’s flair for combining information with easy readability, John provides sharp, cheeky insights into the early flowering of the language, while maintaining a careful decorum in his own usage and abusage. It cannot have been easy: there are so many outrageous puns of the ‘backside’ kind to be attempted, so many rhyming-jingles of the ‘English-Pinglish’ kind to be created! But his gaze is kindly rather than cruel, as he surveys all the errors and omissions that ‘Indlish’ is heir to. However much we might wince at the mangled pronunciations of Indian newsreaders or sneer at the hybrid language of local banner advertisements, this book reminds us to be grateful to all the small-town babus and school teachers without whose early struggles with commas, colons and colonials, you and I would not be sharing this article today."
Manjula Padmanabhan, besides being a cartoonist and illustrator writes rather well as her blog will testify. You can buy this book on Penguin India (ISBN: 014310327X).
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