‘…even I could not understand,
what makes a man strike with a cleaver at the head of someone he has never
seen, a son and husband and father whose sole crime is that he worships a
different God. What makes a man set fire to the homes and the animals and sometimes
the babies of people by whose side he has lived for generations?
What makes a man tear open the
modesty of a girl he has never noticed, spread her legs apart with a knife to
her throat, and thrust his hatred and contempt and fear and desire into her in
a spewing bloody mess of possession? What madness leads men to seek to deprive
others of their lives for the cut of their beards or the cuts on their
foreskins? Where it is written that only he who bears an Arabic name may live
in peace on this part of the soil in India, or that raising one’s hand to God
five times a day disqualifies one from tilling another part of the same soil?’
- The Great Indian Novel, by Shashi Tharoor.
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