Afrah Jamal

Thanks to Liberty Books for the review copy Published in Daily Times / Saturday, August 06, 2011 Reviewed by: Afrah Jamal A local writer once recounted a story where he happened to be on a mailing list that was bombarded by dozens of kindly e-mails from an Indian peer. They were all roughly the same, each disparaging his — the writer’s — (imperfect) nation, its military missteps, defective political/social setup, extremist hideouts; anything and everything was fair game. The one-sided exchange continued till, one day, the writer from the imperfect nation diverted the conversation to a little known resistance movement called the Maoist insurgency. The emails stopped. Someone else, having taken a random combination of words such as challenging the writ of the state, unrest in the tribal areas, military operations, insurrection, IEDs, peace talks, collateral damage and fundamentalists, typically designed to decode the blueprints of neighbouring insurgencies, has unexpectedly ...