Oye crunchy

Advertising star and chick-lit author Anuja Chauhan rustles up a crisp snack to accompany TV cricket

Four bicycles jostle for space outside Anuja Chauhan’s apartment. Three are diminutive and brightly coloured, with seats well polished by the application of active young bottoms. The fourth is black, dusty and has a practical wire basket screwed onto the front. “That one’s mine,” says Chauhan, star adwoman, author of a bestselling new “chick-lit” novel called The Zoya Factor, and mother of three.

Steps to success

Where there are skyscrapers there are staircases, and fanatics to run all the way up them

Mumbai has never been a city of stunted ambitions, but the release of mill lands to developers has made Mumbaikars look upwards as never before: at the monster skyscrapers in which those who can afford to will live and work. A new residential tower in Jogeshwari is going to hit 60 floors. Even in horizontal urbs like Delhi, Hyderabad, Lucknow and Kochi things are looking up.

Charm and hubris

A poet writes an unusual biography of the famous Amises, father and son

Amis & Son: Two Literary Generations
Neil Powell
Macmillan
xiv + 430

“I bought your book today; I bought your daddy’s book too,” a friend told Martin Amis when his novel Money was published in 1984, at the same time as his father Kingsley’s Stanley and the Women. Kingsley was thrilled, writing to his old friend the poet Philip Larkin, “That sentence will only get said once in the history of the world.”