Discontent and Its Civilizations
Mohsin Hamid
Penguin Books. First published 2014.
This is a collection of 36 essays by the author of 'The Reluctant Fundamentalist', originally published between 2000 and 2014 in newspapers and journals such as the New York Times, Dawn, the Times of India, and so on. Chiefly, they chronicle his reactions and emotions to the events at the intersection of the East and the West, the Ancient and the New, the Muslim and the Christian, or in brief, USA and Pakistan. Some the essays are dated, some reveal naivete, some are self-indulgent, and a few are interesting and immediate. All of them, of course, push an upper-middle class liberal-humanist worldview, much like my own, in which there is space for diversity of opinion, for empathy with the less fortunate, and dislike, even positive hatred for closed minds, but at the same time unwillingness to bend too far to give up the privileges that go with the class. They constitute left-liberal soul-food, tasty and nourishing when taken as occasional snacks served in op-ed pages or over the Internet in blogs, but bland, not especially impressive when taken as a continuous meal. Hamid's novel mentioned above, the only one I have read, is a better read, and more illuminating.
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