Coming soon

A die-hard fan of Hindi classics,Desai promises that the book will be full of little known tidbits about the movie like Amrohi wishing to act as one of the heroes of the film. “Amrohi did not finalise Pakeezah’s male leads,which were eventually played by Raj Kumar and Ashok Kumar,for a long time. That’s the reason most of the sequences were shot with Meena Kumari alone,” he shares,before ordering the spiciest pizza at Taj President.

However,before delving fully into the facts and myths surrounding this much-talked about film,the 70-year-old writer has to promote The Rediscovery of India,which tries to explore what makes India a nation as well as puts its nationhood under a scanner. According to him,“India has not been so large and so united under a single power any time previously in its history as it has been since 1947,Partition notwithstanding”. So the only way to stay united is,he says,“to allow thousand identities to bloom”. Though he prefers smaller states to big ones,he advises a feasibility-check before creating separate states.

The author associates a lot of the problems facing India with the flawed understanding of its history. And its history and the way it has led to the creation of this huge nation is what Desai tries to delineate in this book published by Penguin. For that he chronicles India’s history from the time Vasco da Gama arrived in Calicut in 1498. His reason for doing so seems to be two-fold. He wanted to document “the outset of India’s induction into global history,” as well as point out South India’s prominence in India’s past.