The testimony of a disappointed but not resentful Indian fan. My essay for NewYorker.com: Not long ago, I discovered that I could own a piece of my childhood trauma if I shelled out sixteen dollars on eBay. The August 22-28, 1976, issue of the Illustrated Weekly of India, which came out just after the Montreal… Read more »
Posts Tagged: India
Remembering Safdar
In listening to Kanhaiya, I remember Safdar. Rohith, Chandrashekhar, Safdar. They are all martyrs. The martrys aren’t just the soldiers at the border or the farmers committing suicide. I typed “Kanhaiya speech” on Google and that fetched 1,310,000 results. There is exuberance in the return on those numbers, but why isn’t there a more ominous… Read more »
The Literature of Sedition
In my latest The Bookist column for HT Brunch, I have reviewed the literature that is critical of the nation-state and its violence. If the police were to burst into your room while you were sleeping and, putting a gun to your head, ask you to name a literary work that was critical of the… Read more »
Meet Desh Deepak
Meet Desh Deepak. He is an ideal boy. But what kind of a reader is he? This line of inquiry started with my reading of the responses on Twitter to my piece in the Times of India. I wrote this piece and also others as a way of posing questions in the current, somewhat toxic,… Read more »
Writers and the Rioters
A movement has been gathering strength in India. To protest against the murder of writers and the silence of the literary body, writers are returning their awards. The recent lynching of a Muslim man on the suspicion that he had beef in his house brought back vividly the violence of the Gujarat riots that took… Read more »
Mofussil Junction
A piece that I wrote on trains while traveling in a train. It appeared in Northeast Review: My son turned four the other day. Every night I read to him and sometimes we read together a picture book about trains. This is a book my son likes very much. The pictures show trains in bright… Read more »