You know you have arrived at an intellectual when she believes in defeating cliches with...hold your breath, cliches!

"I find India very attractive, enticing and seductive. But we have also moved away from just the exotic imaging of India being beautiful and coulourful and all the cliches the West likes to associate with India, like snake-charmers and tigers, the Taj Mahal, our beautiful women... I think we've quantum-leaped beyond something so quaint. We've proved our mettle in business and technology. We've become an economic powerhouse. So why don't we focus equally on our brainpower?"

So, it is important that we have gotten past cliches...well, Shobhaa De was just answering an equally meaningless question by the equally thoughtless folks at Rediff.:

"How do you want the world to look at India?"

On another note, I've always wondered why there's an extra "a" at the end of her name. Is it "extra" because I accept the more common "Shobha" as conventional? What does that say about me? Or was it a indulgence in numerology by her parents? In any case, it has made me think, which is something new for anything associated with her in writing.