Growing up in a small Indonesian town, Sato Reang has a happy childhood playing soccer and watching crickets fight. Until the day he is circumcised — and his father declares that he is now ‘a pious boy’. Sato soon learns that a life of piety means a loss of all the everyday pleasures he had once enjoyed, as he wakes at dawn for the first call to prayer, and spends the evening in Quranic recitation. Inwardly chafing, Sato outwardly obeys his father’s strictures— until his father dies.
That is when Sato decides to achieve his ambition of not being pious and embarks on a life of mischief — such as pissing on trucks and crates of fruit — and worse, setting fire to the town’s theatre. He no longer goes to the mosque, or prays five times a day. But he does not rest until he makes Jamal, the most pious boy in school, commit a sin — like watching porn and drinking black beer.
What starts as schoolboy fun ends in tragedy, and raises disturbing questions about teenage rebellion, overbearing parenting, force and freedom.
The Dog Meows, the Cat Barks is Eka Kurniawan’s most contemporarily relevant book, and his quixotic switching from first to third person, makes it a truly unique one. Relentlessly funny and frank, this new novel by Indonesia’s best-known writer is compulsive reading.*
The evolution of India’s morning meals
What do India’s cities eat when they wake up, and what do those first bites reveal about how we live?
In First Bite, journalist and food-culture writer Priyadarshini Chatterjee travels through 10 Indian cities — Kolkata, Mumbai, Delhi, Hyderabad, Kochi, Amritsar, Varanasi, Shillong, Bengaluru and Ahmedabad — to explore breakfast as history, habit, and everyday necessity. From temple offerings and home kitchens to roadside stalls and century-old eateries, she follows the morning meal into lanes, markets, and workspaces, uncovering the rhythms that bring a city to life at dawn.
Neither a recipe collection nor a list of must-eat addresses, First Bite instead uses breakfast as a lens to understand how cities function: who wakes early and why, who cooks, who eats out, and how foodways are shaped by labour, migration, caste, class, faith, colonialism, and capitalism. Drawing on archival sources, literature, and ,years of on-the-ground reporting, Chatterjee traces the evolution of India’s morning meals, from ancient texts and ritual offerings to working-class sustenance and the rise of public eateries in urban India.
Written with warmth, rigour, and a reporter’s eye for detail, First Bite blends food history with cultural reportage. It is a book about ordinary meals and the extraordinary stories they carry, and about cities coming awake, one breakfast at a time.*
British and Indian works in dialogue
The Indian Picturesque: Landscape Painting 1800–1850 is a collection of the paintings featured in the exhibition of the same name at DAG, 22A Windsor Place, Janpath, New Delhi, that is on until 2 May 2026. The exhibition and the volume bring together, for the first time, British and Indian landscape paintings from the early nineteenth century to examine their artistic interconnections and shared visual vocabulary. By presenting British and Indian works in dialogue, the exhibition offers a nuanced understanding of artistic exchange, aesthetic transformation and the enduring appeal of picturesque imagery shaped by history and memory and invites audiences and readers to reconsider the visual construction of landscape and modernity in India. Included are large-format aquatints of Henry Salt and James Baillie Fraser, the intimate rural landscapes of George Chinnery, and illustrated travelogues and print culture, that expanded the reach of picturesque imagery and shaped public imagination about India both within and beyond the subcontinent.*
*All copy from book flap and publicity material
