"At quite a few instances, it felt like reading my own experiences on print, replete with all the thrill and anguish. It was heartening. Feminist, and subtly so. I’m not given to cliches like these, but I think I’ll risk it for this particular book – this is one book that’s gonna stay with me for the rest of my life" - The Pensieve
"...it is certainly a guidebook to the interlacing lives of a group of young girls and women, the Rashomon-like dappled truths they tell about their betrayal, longing, rebellion, temptation and that minefield hopscotch of right and wrong, good and bad, in matters of friendship, status, sex, desire and occasional aspiration that makes up the lives of many Indian girls." - Paromita Vohra in Tehelka
"The GIG is full of casual mischief, surreptitious acts and carefully kept secrets... Zaidi and Ravindra’s storytelling and commentaries suffer bouts of laboured poetry but by and large, there’s a lightness in their tone that ensures The Good Indian Girl reads engagingly" - Deepanjana Pal in Mumbai Boss Recommends.
"... a book of surprisingly subversive tales in which girls interact with men, climb down rope ladders (“BIG Girls”), flirt and draw back (“Strangers”), cut themselves (“Out of Here”), are nervous and afraid around men but simultaneously willing to play along (“Finger Play”) and manipulate their perceived goodness for their own ends (“Daddy’s Girls”). They are less about emphasizing the restrictions placed on Indian women than they are about how women use and test them" - Aishwarya Subramanian in Mint
"... unlike the more annoying fractured narratives that found currency in Hollywood movies like Crash and Mexican ones like Amores Perros, these stories grow organically, branching out and reaching heights of joy or digging roots deep down to the darker side of being a young woman in India" - Saudha Kasim
"Good Indian Girls does provide important insights into why many Indian women do the things they do, sometimes even without knowing it." - Anjana Basu in Women's Web
"If I were asked to name this book, I would have called it “Splendid Stories of Good Indian Girls, Which Can Be Enjoyed By All.” And man, what classy stories they are. Some of them are not more than two pages long and some run to ten pages or more. Each of them is about an Indian girl, mostly good, a few bad and many who are not so good, but manage to get away with it. Zaidi and Ravindra write in excellent unobtrusive prose which is akin to high quality corn flour used in good chicken soup. You don’t really get to taste the corn flour and don’t even think of it much as you gulp down the soup, but without the quality corn flour, the soup wouldn’t be half as enjoyable." - Blog review by Vinod Joseph
More reviews: At Justfemme
Interviews:
"We did some interviews, informal chats with friends, or friends of friends. The only question I asked was: What makes for a Good Indian Girl (or a Not-Good girl)? Some scrap of memory would be volunteered.
For instance, the bit about a girl sticking together two pages in her scrapbook to hide a photo of a film star posing sexily – a friend actually did that. Someone else told me about family friends who’d sneak out from a second-floor window in their Delhi bungalow using a rope ladder; they actually had a fixed phone line that their dad knew nothing about. Yet another friend told me about how a group of girls broke some rules in school, but the prettiest girl got off lightly, while the girl with the biggest breats was ostracised." From an interview with Out of Print.
"These stories need to be told partly for the same reason that any story needs to be told and partly because, where girls-women are concerned, the pressure to conform to strange stereotypes of ‘good’ or to live up to the ideal of ‘good Indian girl’ is higher. Forgiveness does not come so easily if we challenge those stereotypes, and social censure for being ‘bad’ ranges from criticism for not being ‘Indian’ enough to outright violence" In the Pune Mirror.
About the Good Indian Girl in The Hindu, Bangalore MetroPlus.
Desperately Seeking Savitri in Mid-Day
At a book blog.
At The Tossed Salad.
About colourful creatures out of a filmi imagination.
On Terror.
Reviews for Known Turf: Bantering with Bandits and Other True Tales
"Known Turf is a wonderfully engaging example of a puzzling trend in contemporary Indian writing in English. Despite the hype surrounding the novels-with-large-advances, the best writing today is happening in non-fiction." Alok Rai in Outlook
"At its best, the book combines a reporter’s on-the-spot perception and a writer’s reflection and language to etch interesting, nuanced portraits of that half-mythical being in the throes of constant change: contemporary India. Known Turf is definitely worth reading, and not just for the sake of Gabbar Singh." Tabish Khair in Mint
"...anyone who has braved the railways without a confirmed reservation will get cathartic pleasure reading Zaidi’s graphic account of sitting on the corner of a seat, at a 45 degrees angle, with an RAC (Reservation against cancellation) ticket in a train to Lucknow" Alpana Chowdhury in DNA
"Tragic and tender and brutal and funny." Known Turf covers a lot of turf.
"A book like this, written by someone who may once have been just as sheltered as they were, will resonate with Generation iPad in a way that a more world-weary account would bypass entirely." Manjula Padmanabhan in Outlook Traveller
"It’s a rare look into the lives of dacoits minus caricature. Zaidi’s writing attempts to evoke an understanding of their reality." The Reporter and her Beat in Civil Society
"Among all the issues that Zaidi touches on, I find molestation to be the most moving. Though she puts in a lot of information on the other subjects she chooses, the whole force of her personality comes into play only when she starts speaking of molestation and eve teasing." From here
More reviews here, here, here, here, here, and here.
