Idle Thoughts

Now coming back to the book itself, in what I write here, I might appear to be arguing with the book and the author and agreeing with them. But that is to be expected – we are dealing with a widely debated topic and it would be foolish to expect that the book would convince and convert me to its line of thinking. The book did successfully engage me in a debate with it and with myself. This being a book on democracy and healthy debates, I am sure that the author would be very pleased with the result that it has produced. The author starts out explaining why he named his book as The Intolerant Indian. More than those reasons, I thought it goes well with the more celebrated predecessors like The Argumentative Indian and The Scientific Indian. However, the content of the book is only so much about Intolerance of the Indian – the book talks more about the State than the people, and that too more about not being secular than being intolerant. So a title like ‘the non-secular India’, th

I picked up the book Intolerant Indian by Gautam Adhikari from Bangalore airport some months back, and finished reading the book in a couple of weeks. From then, I was considering noting down my thoughts on this book. The book covered a topic that is very interesting to me, which is why I picked it up from the bookshop in the first place. It raised a lot more questions than providing answers, which was not really a bad thing. But the book did not leave me better equipped to analyze these questions, which according to me, was a bad thing. So I decided to do that preparation myself. Here I am sharing most of my thoughts with you, as I went through it. It might be that my brain is too simplistic that I needed further assistance. Those of you who have a better IQ than me (which means most of the world) might find these points too trivial. Before we discuss the intolerance of Indians, it is important to answer some fundamental questions. Why it is important to be tolerant for democrac