Aatish Taseer

The author straddles many fracture lines: Hindu-Muslim, India-Pakistan in the subcontinent, western education and Indian cultural roots, and so on. He makes an honest attempt to come to India, to access the Hindu-Indian-traditional part of his civilizational heritage, and that too to the centre of traditional Hindu, Sanskrit learning, the Brahmins of Banaras in the Ganges valley. Here he meets up with both men on the street (Brahmins of the present age), as well as tradition-bound scholars, some of them schooled strictly in the traditional ways, and some who know also the world of modern linguistic and philosophical scholarship. But he is defeated, ultimately, by the lack of self-awareness, the mistaken conviction that the scriptures contain all knowledge, the absence of a critical understanding of what the British (and for that matter the Muslim) interludes and interactions have meant, and the lack of any future prospects for the purely backward-looking world view of his contacts. He decides he is better off in the west, where there is an element of rationality and more productive civilizational values of the Enlightenment and the respect for the individual. In this, he confirms the reaction that most modern English-schooled Indians have to the uglier manifestations of the current Hindutva movement in India.… (mer)

'The Way Things Were' is an ode to Sanskrit and a reminder of what it actually means to be a rational Indian... This book tells a beautiful bittersweet story of a family against the backdrop of changing phases of Indian politics...

Aatish Taseer places history in the center and explores the different approaches towards the recorded past and how these approaches affect psyches of people and thus the future of a nation... And in all this how we lose the very essence of history which is to learn from our mistakes in the past... Instead we lose our future by using history to recreate those mistakes in the name of securing our religions.

'The Way Things Were' has a lot of important things to say... A Must Read...… (mer)