Hindu

I finished writing a collection of short-stories, which has appeared as Kafka Sutra, almost after a year of turmoil and obsessive work, in February 2016. Three or four days after I secretly mailed the manuscript to my editors, I still remember how the news left me aghast when I sat down to eat my dinner with the idiot box before my eyes. Some Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) students had chanted slogans inside the campus, which they had swiftly denied.

With this collection of short stories, Imtiaz Akhtar makes his bold debut. Kafka Sutra is the sort of book that as a teenager, I would have loved to sneak from my mother’s shelf, and that as a mother, I would secretly enjoy letting my daughter or son whisk away.

The landslide election earlier this month of Narendra Modi does not bode well for the 800 million or so Indians living in destitution, or the 120 million minority Muslims in the country, or the Adivasi (indigenous) people and Dalit groups sitting on resource-rich land in Orissa, Jharkhand and elsewhere. He may well come from a humble background, but Mr. Modi’s loyalties lie firmly with the corporations of India, not the chai wallahs working the train station at Vadnagar in Gujarat State like his father once did.