Both the writer’s works expand our understanding of a world where the individual-state relationship is changing faster than ever before
During a recent online conversation between writers Suketu Mehta and Amitava Kumar, organised by the National Arts Club, the former narrated an anecdote from his 2019 non-fiction book This Land is Our Land: An Immigrant’s Manifesto. The author of the acclaimed Maximum City described scenes from his New York youth, including the largely working-class Queens school he went to at the time. “Growing up in Queens, I attended what in India would be called a ‘convent school’,” Mehta said. “It was a Catholic school, 90 per cent of the students belonged to white working-class families, and I was the representative of everything their parents feared. I was basically meat thrown to the lions.”
Soon, Mehta realised that appeals to logic and rationality would do little to stop the racism directed at him. In a scene that he also recounted for Kumar during their conversation, a fellow teenager mocks Mehta and his Indian friend near their school, around the time of the Iranian hostage crisis. “****ing Ayatollahs,” he says. After he is told that Indians are not, in fact, Iranians, he thinks for a moment before saying, “****ing Gandhis!”
Soon, Mehta realised that appeals to logic and rationality would do little to stop the racism directed at him. In a scene that he also recounted for Kumar during their conversation, a fellow teenager mocks Mehta and his Indian friend near their school, around the time of the Iranian hostage crisis. “****ing Ayatollahs,” he says. After he is told that Indians are not, in fact, Iranians, he thinks for a moment before saying, “****ing Gandhis!”