Talk:Pico Iyer

message: I'm sorry that my addition about the school chess team was deleted. I thought it was sufficiently interesting. Maybe it is not strictly verifiable; I could verify it, but it would be a lot of bother, and anyway I do not think it contravenes the spirit of the verifiability guidelines. Viewfinder 03:52, 2 August 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: diff for reference. --Quiddity 17:35, 1 October 2007 (UTC)
thread_title: School team

message: I find the tone of the writing in this article to be a little autobiographical (and not particularly WP:NPOV). I applaud Mr. Iyer for noting that he made changes to the article himself, but the official Wikipedia policy toward autobiographical changes to articles requires that the subject of the article request these changes through the article's talk page. See Wikipedia:Autobiography. —The preceding unsigned comment was added by 69.108.108.193 (talk • contribs) .
::In theory, you are right, but in practice, I do not think any breach of the spirit of Wikipedia's guidelines has occurred. I do not think the edits by Mr Iyer have made the article into any more of a eulogy than it already was. If editors who are merely improving the accuracy of articles about themselves are expected to use the above mentioned talk page procedure, it will discourage them from making such improvements, and that would not be good. Viewfinder 08:14, 12 August 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Autobiographical writing 

message: A recent version of this article tells us: Iyer was born in Oxford England to Indian parents, Nandini Iyer and Raghavan N Iyer. (The current version doesn't name either.) Offhand I don't know about the former name but I believe that the latter is correct. I wonder why this information was removed. -- Hoary 11:13, 15 February 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: Removed again, with the explanation Only tiny changes for accuracy. Most mysterious. -- Hoary (talk) 00:56, 14 February 2008 (UTC)
thread_title: Parents

message: See this edit. I wonder why it is that so many IP numbers are so keen to make this or that little change elsewhere, to remove any mention of The Recovery of Innocence and to misinform readers that Video Night was Iyer's first book. If anyone is interested, here is Amazon's (uninformative) page on it. No, I don't say that a retailer is a reliable source: we have other reliable sources, and the Amazon page is of interest as it shows the cover. -- Hoary (talk) 02:10, 29 December 2009 (UTC)
thread_title: ''The Recovery of Innocence'', yet again

message: At the moment the introduction is simply "Pico Iyer (born 1957) is a British-born essayist and novelist." I'm adding a line or two like what the reader might see inside the back cover of one of his books.PrBeacon (talk) 23:12, 24 April 2010 (UTC)
thread_title:  Intro too short 

message: Here's a very strange edit.
Here's one part of it. From:
:Iyer was born in Oxford, England, the son of the Tamil-speaking Brahmin Raghavan N. Iyer, an Oxford philosopher and theosophist,
(with two sources) to:
:Iyer was born in Oxford, England, the son of {Raghavan Iyer did not speak Tamil} Raghavan N. Iyer, an Oxford philosopher and Theosophist,
(with the sources unaltered). Neither source includes the string "tamil" or "brahmin", so this seems an obvious improvement (as well as being closer to the truth, for all I know).
There's also the change from:
:words for accompaniment by a chamber orchestra.
to:
:words for accompaniment by a chamber orchestra.Auckland Chamber Orchestra, performed before the prime minister and an Auckland audience, May 2007)
[to which I've added a "{"]. No evidence, but it's some detail to go on.
And there's more besides. Including yet another unexplained deletion of any mention of The Recovery of Innocence, a copy of which lies on my table next to my computer as I type this. 
I wish this person who is so keen to erase any mention of The Recovery of Innocence would participate in this talk page. -- Hoary (talk) 11:17, 2 August 2010 (UTC)
thread_title: Odd edit

message: I see the subject's name in Tamil script (சித்தார்த் பைக்கோ ராகவன் ஐயர்) in the article. It is unknown if the subject can read/write/speak Tamil. And further unknown whether he could write his name in Tamil. His connection to the Tamil language is tenuous, at best. I do not see a reason to have the subject's name in Tamil script in this article in English wikipedia except for the subject's ancestry. 
Thoughts on removing or keeping it?
Thaths (talk) 05:28, 6 November 2018 (UTC)
thread_title:  Is the Tamil version of the subject's name really necessary in the English article? 

message: I have commenced a tidy-up of the Bibliography section using cite templates for books and articles, as well as tables for organising short stories, poems and/or book reviews. Capitalization and punctuation follow standard cataloguing rules in AACR2 and RDA, as much as Wikipedia templates allow it. ISBNs and other persistent identifiers, where available, are commented out, but still available for reference. This is a work in progress; feel free to continue. Sunwin1960 (talk) 03:15, 28 March 2021 (UTC)
thread_title:  Bibliography