NonFiction
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Revati Laul takes us through the riots in Gujarat in the form of shoft stories about people who were involved. It's less about the events and more about the sentiment and mentality behind them. To be sure, the Gujarat riots were a horrific occurence and one that left a big scar. The author's ability to make it personal for some of those involved can help to explain why mentalities and actions occured as they did.
Reading this made me deeply angry at how easy it is to manipulate simple people and how India was manipulated and fooled into the communal violence routine it readily embraces to this day. It's unnecesary and a shame. Like anywhere with uneducatied masses, creating enmity and communal identities results in mindsets that are difficult to change. As someone who grew up in the United states, watching the changes in socially accepted behaviors and mindsets from a mainly uneducated mass of people is hard to swallow. It's hard to swallow knowing that news media and politicians engineered this mindset - the same as India.
The stories in this book aren't shocking or outrageous, they're just about ordinary people driven by their upbringing and mindset. They're not necessarily bad people, but they did bad things. It makes one wonder what we ourselves would do in such a situation or even our neighbors should they be different from us. It's anathema - individualist thoughts in such a deeply community minded country. This is a definite read - it personalizes and gives accountability for the tragedy that happened.
Read it.
~Becky~
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