Gay Bombay book in stores this week + Delhi reading on 28 April

My book Gay Bombay: Globalization, Love and (Be)Longing in Contemporary India - a multi-sited ethnography in an online-offline community, where I examine how Internet technologies, the media industry, audiences and broader socio-historical contexts shape modern Indian gay identity - hit the stores this week. Above, you can see a picture from the book display at Oxford book store in Bombay (taken by my friend Jayesh with his state of the art cellphone camera). Note that the book is present in the store-front window (there, near the top, on the left, see it?) Inside the store, I believe that it occupies pride of place on a shelf display towards the front. (And rumor has it, the book is flying off the shelves so soon that the staff can hardly keep up :-) My publishers have informed me that the book is now available at all Crossword and Oxford bookstores across India, as well as other city-specific book stores (Granth, Danai, Bookpoint and Nalanda in Bombay, for instance).

Meanwhile, I am going to be Delhi for a conference on April 29, and my publishers Sage and I have decided to quickly put together a book reading the evening before. Here are the details - I hope those of you who live in Delhi will make it.

Date: 28 April, 2008
Venue: Oxford Book Store, Statesman Building, Barakhamba Road.
Time: 6.30 pm
Program: Pretty informal. There's no chief guest so far, and no ribbon to cut. We'll gather around, I'll read some selections, hopefully someone will ask something deep and meaningful in the Q and A session that follows, and then, the crowd will slowly thin out, and then the last few people who are remaining will stare at each other, and then someone will suggest dinner and then everyone will go, and then new connections will be made and old renewed, and then perhaps someone will sing some old Hindi songs for the the evening to end with a warm fuzzy afterglow.
Coming?

Here are some chapter excerpts, as a preview.
Chapter 1
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5