Recommends In Spite of the Gods.

Transcript context

…I think he’s underrated, because he’s been forgotten. I think he was one of the most brilliant poets. I think we should judge him on his poetry and forgive the fact that he wanted to get the hell out of Dodge in 1939, because he wasn’t. His contemporaries questioned why he was crossing the Atlantic at that particular moment. But his poetry is brilliant and eternal. I’d say he’s been forgotten. You’ve written one of my favorite books on India, “In Spite of the Gods,” which I recommend to you all. If we think about the fate of liberalism in India, right now there’s an enormous effort going on to biometrically record people, have markers of their identity, and possibly tie this in to some notion of a Universal Guaranteed Income, or at least greater reliance on cash transfers. There will be much more aid to people, but also much more control of people under the Modi regime, which has pushed for both aid and control in different ways and hasn’t liberalized as much as many people had expected. Is India right now moving in a liberal direction? It would be hard to argue that it is. Narendra Modi has been doing a lot of things under the radar, in terms of chipping away at the Indian secular, Nehruvian secular constitution of India. Making it harder for minorities ‑‑ Muslims, Christians, and others ‑‑ to express themselves freely, in terms of allowing far‑right groups associated with the Sangh Parivar, which is the broad name given to the Hinduite far movement, of which the BJP is a branch. The RSS is really the parent. Allowing groups, the most vicious youth wing, the Bajrang Dal, and VHP, another very hard‑right part of the Hinduite far movement, a lot more leeway legally to harass minorities and changing of the curriculum. To rewrite it, to make India Hindu and Hindu India, and completely downplay the extraordinarily important Muslim contribution to what is a syncretic culture, a riot of faith and interactions, and a glory of pluralism.…

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