Ways of Being Desi
Ziauddin Sardar
Penguin
229 pages; Rs 599
Ziauddin Sardar’s Ways of Being Desi is a curious mishmash of several genres: Personal memoir, film criticism, and armchair political commentary, none of which coheres with the other, giving the book an unbaked feel.
As a Pakistani settled in London, Mr Sardar presents his personal struggles in obtaining a visa or dealing with the bureaucracy as an outcome of a typical desi culture that spans the entire subcontinent. While this may be partly true, his tendency to present the Indo-Pak conflict as emerging from a similar fatalism can jar for its refusal to contend
