The GreatBongBook...

...is out! I met Arnab for the first time last evening, just before the launch of May I Hebb Your Attention Pliss, and of course it didn't feel like we were meeting for the first time. We've been blog-buddies for over five years, having bonded over such topics as Revenge of the Sith and trollish commenters, back in the days when the Indian blogosphere was in diapers.

The panel discussion was fun: Nilanjana moderated expertly (not an easy task when you're juggling four bloggers, including yourself, and also trying to keep the focus on the book of the evening), Arnab was very articulate, Sidin was very funny, and I managed to keep my hair in place (and was later commended for it by Samit, Aishwarya and Aayush, who spent the evening sniggering away in the audience, as these literary types tend to do). Topics discussed were too many to list in full but included the Mithun film Gunda as Bollywood's seminal achievement; why blogs are more respectable than books; religious babies; Shah Rukh Khan as the Matsya avatar of Lord Vishnu; and women who weed south Indian men out of the gene pool because their names are too complicated. Peals of laughter rang through the hall, and not just from Arnab's family (who had been instructed to laugh at regular intervals).

Finally: DO NOT email Arnab asking him to mail you a PDF file of the book "because I find it easier to read books on the computer". If this really is the case, you should buy a hard-copy (from a bookshop) and get it scanned and transferred to the soft-copy format of your liking. That's the morally correct way to do these things, as any publishing house will tell you.

Update: Arnab's post about the event (along with pictures and videos) is here.