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“... it to get to the Labour Exchange on time I don’t linger to admire the scenery. Every time I go past the fountain, near where Henry Royce’s statue used to stand, I mutter and tick away to myself: ‘Fkin bastids fkin bastids fkin bastids’. I saw that on a wall once and it seems to express something inchoate and furious. The Council came and took away ...”

“... Acrumpled​ hundred-rupee banknote falls from a man’s pocket. The camera shows Gandhi’s face on the note. A young girl picks the money up, and asks her mother what she should do with it. Her mother says she can get herself chocolate, buy a doll or give it back. The girl hands the note back to the man who dropped it. Against a background of sentimental music, a voice announces: ‘If every mother gives her child a pinch of honesty every day, the nation will become honest too ...”

“... or neglected sons, such as he shows various Sants in the recent limelight to have been – Fateh Singh, Longowal, Bhindranwale. Of this last and most colourful figure, head of the extremists who perished in the Golden Temple, he gives a convincing description. Bhindranwale, like most others of his calling, had a limited education, and little knowledge of ...”

“... makes me restless and resentful when I find myself invited to other cities, but with no excuse to go to Bombay. It’s presumably what drove Mehta, who moved to New York when he was 14, to go back. It’s what made the poet Arun Kolatkar, author of the classic Jejuri, set out every Thursday from his small apartment in ...”

“... the girls’ brother Nadeem, and when I told him what I had learnt in Pakistan, he said he would go there himself if he had to in order to secure the girls’ safe return. I contacted the editor of the BBC’s Frontline Scotland and suggested that they might want to film the journey. Within a few days Sarwar, a television crew and I had secured visas thanks ...”

“... The English mathematician G.H. Hardy, who worked in the purest of all mathematical fields, the theory of numbers, used to boast in his patrician way that nothing he did in mathematics would ever be useful. He must be turning in his grave at developments in the ‘science of secrecy’ over the last quarter of a century ...”

“... seats to form a government. The unlikely coalition that did, made up of the Janata Dal under V.P. Singh (Rajiv Gandhi’s former finance minister who’d resigned in disgust at what he claimed had become pervasive corruption at the top), the Bengal Marxists and the now lively and strikingly well-organised BJP, split within the year. The BJP could not accept ...”

“... Toba Tek Singh’ is one of a number of stories about Partition by Saadat Hasan Manto, a brilliant, alcoholic Urdu writer who himself moved from Bombay to Lahore in 1948. It is set in a Lahore asylum whose inmates are about to be split up according to their religion. When they are taken to the border for the exchange, the story’s Sikh protagonist – known as Toba Tek Singh after the town he comes from – refuses to co-operate ...”

“... the new parliament. As the results started coming in, a veteran Congress leader in Bhopal, Ratan Singh, had a heart attack and dropped dead. A tragedy overlaid with symbolism. There was some resistance to the BJP, especially in the south: in Andhra Pradesh, Kerala and Tamil Nadu, the BJP didn’t win a single seat. But overall the results showed ...”

“... party of government, bent and in hock to the IMF, seizes on a national tour by the great wrestler Singh to represent its own prowess and symbolise its forthcoming triumph at the polls. Singh, wooed away from the Opposition, has never been known to lose: indeed his attraction lies in the fact that his victory is only ever a ...”

“... and argues with these reactions, while deliberately not resolving them. In ‘Booking Khan Singh Kumar’, for example, he directly asks the audience whose applause he seeks: ‘Did you make me for the gap in the market/Did I make me for the gap in the market . . . Can I cream off awards from your melting-pot phase . . . Do you medal yourselves ...”

“... clashes between Sunni and Shia Muslims.Worse lay ahead, however. In 1819 the soldiers of Ranjit Singh, the charismatic leader of the Sikhs, already triumphant in northern India, took Srinagar. There was no resistance worth the name. Kashmiri historians regard the 27 years of Sikh rule that followed as the worst calamity ever to befall their country. The ...”

“... her brother, the Governor-General, to the court of the last great King of the Sikhs, Ranjit Singh. The mixture of scepticism and humour, unwillingness and curiosity, with which she set out is recorded early in the journals, and prepares us for what is to come: ‘Do you think we shall get safely back again? I have my doubts because the wild beasts in ...”

“... sells popsicles), of Imam Din (who cooks and polygamises), of Hari (a gardener), of Sher Singh (a zookeeper), of Sharbat Khan (a knife-grinder) – all of them rich personalities in their own right, and all, for the purposes of the story, representative of the religious and ethnic mix, Hindu and Sikh and Muslim, of India before partition. This ...”

“... in ‘Kama’, which begins with a murder; the protagonist is a police inspector, Sartaj Singh, whose marriage has broken down – Singh is one of the many nobodies with whom Chandra populates his cityscape (the unnamed narrator and the storyteller Subramanian are two others); he represents both a strange ...”