“Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” Tolstoy’s famous line from Anna Karenina seems apt to comment on the place that the ghettoized Indian Muslim holds in Bharat today. In City on Fire, Zeyad Masroor Khan tells us his story of growing up in the prone-to-riots, historic ghetto of Upar Kot in Aligarh, …
In her thought-provoking 1961 essay, philosopher Hannah Arendt dealt with the “banality of evil” by engaging in conversations with German officers who worked in concentration camps and presided over the killing of Jews. In his debut book, City on Fire: A Boyhood in Aligarh, Zeyad Masroor Khan grapples with something similar. While Zeyad’s uncles chose migration to Pakistan, his father, …
