Dheeraj Kalgutkar

The plant that we so diligently watered and cared for has grown into a big banyan; full of flowers and fruits. Own it now. 53 people have lost their lives in the Delhi riots. You have heard this already. But do you see the problem here? Riot? Was it really a riot? Is it a riot if the state machinery and police take sides; forget keeping silent while mobs went on a rampage but Delhi police took stones in their own hands and threw them at the other side, they directed and aided one side of the mob (as if there was another side anyway), they climbed and destroyed CCTV cameras . Yes, police did all this. It’s all on record. There are videos after videos that prove all this. How then can we call it a riot? It was a pogrom. As Rana Ayyub called, state-sponsored anti-Muslim pogrom. Let’s call it what it was. Now that we have settled on the calling business, let’s get on to our language. The 53 dead bodies, actually in some cases, there were no bodies, only a limb which police...

Rana Ayyub says, the book is not just about Gujarat riots and fake encounters but also about Haren Pandya murder. It is a fact well known that not all drafts gets published and turn into books, and how publishers choose what they will print and what they won't. Most of the times their decisions are legit and have something to do with literary value of the draft at hand but not all the time. Stories may have been already said, might be similar to what is already published, readers don't find this interesting anymore, so on and so forth. But that is for fiction, what about non-fiction? Non-fiction is not about spilling your imaginative beans but telling a compelling story about what has occurred in fact, it is about what you have seen or heard, essentially it is about retelling a story or predicting the future on the basis of past events. Now, why would that be devoid of its right to get printed? Again, there are scores of reasons from the quality of content to impo...