Breakfast with Evil and Other Risky Ventures is a pre-emptive attempt to bring together the scattered writings of Ashis Nandy over his entire span of writing career and scan those scattered lectures, interviews, and writings including essays and columns for newspapers and journals for anin-depth analytical study. As the author himself explains, these are not his musings on static, time-bound issues, rather they capture how he confronts and negotiates the living past in the political, social, and cultural landscape of South Asia - starting from the manmade famine of 1943 to thePartition and freedom of India and the birth of Pakistan in 1947, the Bangladesh War in 1971, and the protracted civil war in Sri Lanka (1983-2009). The essays, often written as forewords to other scholars' works, straddle languages, systems of knowledge, and forms of voice and silence. Nandyattempts to identify a critical and intellectual strategy for survival in the Third World. He establishes that though a traumatic ambience - marred by aggressive development, instant nationalisms, or the brutalizing spectacles of modern nation-states - numbs one's imagination, it can also lead tonew worldviews and multiple creative forms of resistance. | Breakfast with Evil and Other Risky Ventures by Ashis Nandy, Hardcover | Indigo Chapters