It was cold and smoggy the day Delhi was nuked. “My son will become a superstar like Dilip Kumar," she’d tell him. “There is no chance of that happening now," Dilip thought as he got ready for his day’s delivery—a 30kg sack of roasted cashews destined for a trader in Old Delhi’s Khari Baoli. “They will seal the surroundings to …
“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, …
My understanding of the concept of home was destroyed and then remade. I firmly believe most privileged people “choose” to be disillusioned because they don’t want to make efforts to change things. Didn’t monuments constructed by Muslims, now not seen as “Indian”, bring revenue to the Indian exchequer? When I was a boy who was part of the Tablighi Jamaat, …
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, …
