Aatish taser biography of barack
We Shall Be a Country with No History
By AATISH TASEER
Zack was slim and handsome, of mixed race, and from the Midwest. He had spoken early on to me of his “protestant work ethic,” and already in those first weeks, when everybody was drinking beer from plastic cups and enjoying the good weather, I would see him putting his words into action.
Every day he went directly from his classes to the sunless C-section of the Robert Frost Library. He remained there, in that gloomy basement, till four-thirty, surfacing only for a hurried cigarette. Dressed in stained khakis and a flimsy blue shirt, under which a white undershirt was visible, he could be seen pacing the library’s granite steps, tensely studying the reference cards he had filled, in an abrupt, jagged hand, with notes from his afternoon’s reading. If anyone approached him, he would look at the person for a moment or so with the terrifying aspect of the Nietzschean solitary, wild-faced and fresh out of the cave. Then this expression would give way to an unnatural smiling manner that would send the intruder faster on his way than the grimmer visage.At four-thirty he would break for dinner, which meant a short trip to the dining hall, where he packed himself two sandwiches in brown paper napkins. Then he would return to the library for the rest of the evening. At close to nine, if I was lucky, I would be summoned for a drink. This occasion, though it had the outward appearance of a festivity, was no less utilitarian. It was a ninety-minute session in which Zack smoked Black & Mild cigars while hastily drinking from a gallon bottle of Carlo Rossi’s red wine, spilling it here and there, further staining his khakis. Over the course of these ninety minutes, after which I would be ushered out of his room, he would speak, drink, and smoke with the force of a man wishing to relax his mind for sleep. And as it softened, the day’s reading poured out of him, bri Author Aatish Taseer was born in the UK, the son of prominent Indian journalist Tavleen Singh and Pakistani politician, Salmaan Taseer. For his new book, “The Twice Born: Life and Death on the Ganges,” Taseer traveled to Benares, the spiritual home of Hinduism for an up-close look at what the caste system means in India today. Caste — the social and religious hierarchy of Hinduism — can have profound impacts on the trajectory of a person’s life and governs any number of social interactions. It remains resilient in modern India, and Taseer considers its link to the rise of the Hindu nationalism. He talked with The World’s Marco Werman about his encounters with upper-caste Brahmin scholars, and described several of the most revealing moments from his trip to Hinduism’s holiest city. Related:Even with a Harvard pedigree, caste follows ‘like a shadow’ Aatish Taseer: A kind of tension starts to settle over this meal. We’re in a Brahmin village and I am not of a Brahmin background. I have a Muslim father, but I, in a funny way, am exempt from the rules of caste. It doesn’t apply to me, but obviously my driver, who is of this lower-caste background is not exempt from the rules of caste. He comes and sits down and he’s chatting and he’s sort of enjoying the meal and this tremendous tension, terrific tension, kind of descends over the meal. And I can’t figure out what’s going on, but a kind of silence takes over and finally this young Brahmin boy leans in and says to me, “You know, we’ve made this amazing exception to allow your friend to eat with us. But,” he said, “Now, t A child of the 1980s, Aatish Taseer was born in London to a Sikh mother and Muslim father, brought up in Delhi and educated in the US. Yet the constant feature of Taseer’s intercontinental upbringing was first introduced in his Costa award-shortlisted debut The Temple Goers: “Delhi drawing rooms. They were what I remembered of the city of my childhood … There was no setting more evocative than a lamplit drawing room with a scattering of politicians, journalists, broken-down royals and perhaps an old Etonian lying flatly on a deep sofa.” This deracinated, affluent milieu comes as second nature to a writer who attracts profiles in Vogue, has dated minor British royalty and has been feted by the Evening Standard as “a model-handsome, sought-after guest at the smartest London dinner parties”. The Delhi drawing-room set chattered away in Taseer’s second novel, Noon, and the increasing obsolescence of the post-colonial elite forms a significant part of his third work of fiction as well. Yet The Way Things Were is a more ambitious novel, in which Taseer seeks to reconcile the ancient mysteries of classical Vedic culture with the overcrowded, politico-religious minefield of modern India. Such an epic endeavour – spanning the period from 1975, when Indira Gandhi proclaimed the Emergency, to the destruction of the Babri mosque in 1992 – risks falling short. Yet collapse of intellectual ambition is the novel’s principal theme, as Taseer bases the story on the grand delusion of a scholarly central character who cannot bear to acknowledge that his life’s work has been without significance. Professor Toby Ketu is the last maharaja of a remote northern province (“A mere princeling,” he apologises, “and rather more -ling than prince”), who has spent more time on the international lecture circuit than in his ancestral lands, developing his theories on the origins of classical Indian poetics. His In ‘Twice Born,’ author Aatish Taseer explores the impact of caste in today’s India
Marco Werman: Aatish Taseer, you traveled to the Indian city of Benares. That’s the spiritual capital of Hinduism and home of twice born Brahmins, a priestly caste devoted to sacred learning. Tell me about what happened one evening when your lower-caste driver shared a meal with you and your Brahmin hosts.
The Way Things Were by Aatish Taseer review – tracing India’s ancient past
A Son's Journey: Aatish Taseer
Born in London in 1980 to Taseer, the slain governor of Pakistan’s Punjab province, and renowned Indian journalist Tavleen Singh, a Sikh by faith, Aatish always wanted to discover the faith of his father, Islam. In fact, he went on to write a book with a strong tone of the “unusual” about it, Strangers to History: A Son’s Journey Through Islamic Lands. It was based on a journey he took some two decades after he was born, chasing an obsession: his absent father. As a kid, all he ever had of his father was a photograph. He grew up in Delhi with his mother before he was sent to a residential school in Kodaikanal.
Brought up in a Sikh family in Delhi, where his cousins wore turbans while he was made to feel specially unusual without them, Taseer Jr was destined to make that eight-month tour — to Iran, Turkey, Syria, Saudi Arabia and finally to Pakistan, where he met his father.
He had said in an interview: “I wanted only to understand the distances that had arisen between my father and me. The reason I wanted to do this was because I felt instinctively that there was something deeper behind those distances, something that would help illuminate a situation wider than my own personal context.” The purpose of his trip was also to parley on equal terms with his father by gaining knowledge of how a person who doesn’t practice the religion can still call himself a Muslim.
After meeting his father, he said in an interview that he “overcame the estrangement” with his father, a secular Muslim in Islamic Pakistan, who died in the same way India’s former Prime minister Indira Gan