Today’s English-language edition of Mid-Day, a daily Mumbai compact newspaper, features an article that profiles Waugh’s 1934 novel A Handful of Dust and compares it to the social mores of the present day. This is by Aditya Sinha in his column “The Hippie Hindu.” The article begins by describing the book as “simultaneously a hilarious novel while being a most depressing read.” After summarizing the plot, Sinha continues
Waugh’s writing pierces the heart of two matters: marriage and human nature. Marriage is such a precarious and impossible Westphalian balance-of-power that it often ends in a Cold War type standoff, each partner held back by the fear of Mutually Assured Destruction (yes, marriage is MAD). Brenda’s feeling of imprisonment is uncannily familiar…In A Handful of Dust, Waugh takes the most intimate human connection, marriage, to reveal our wasteland of savagery; and if two people can’t escape the asphyxiation of association, then society likely can’t, either. No surprise that the modern world around us often seems more depressing than the saddest of stories. Waugh got his novel’s title from TS Eliot’s The Waste Land, which says: “our society promises to show us fear, in a handful of dust”. That possibly exemplifies our modern condition.
Sinha also manages to get in a mention of Waugh’s follow-on novel  Scoop (1938) which he describes as:
a riotous look at journalism through stylised prose…[that] never resorts to abuse, [in] contrast to the illiterate hordes in contemporary India, whose intellectual achievement is to call journalists “presstitutes”.Â
