| Identity... talks of how violence is created by the illusion of a singular identity, to the exclusion of others, and draws on the past and the present to resolve the problems faced by a strife-torn world. The recent global confrontations "" 9/11 and other incidents of violence "" are a corollary of religious and cultural divisions, Sen said. |
| Sen, whose book The Argumentative Indian has sold more than 57,000 copies so far in about a year, held the audience captive with his quick wit even as he transcended time to talk about Ibn Battuta, Akbar, the India-Pakistan partition and the concept of "faith schools" in UK today. |
| Sen also drew on literature to make his case. |
| He had good company in Najam Sethi, editor-in-chief, The Friday Times, and N Ram, editor-in-chief, The Hindu group of publications, who jointly released the book and read excerpts from it. |
| Sen also drew on literature to make his case, quoting Derek Walcott's A Far Cry from Africa, which voiced the dilemma of a man faced with the task of choosing one identity over another, and Matthew Arnold's Dover Beach (I love, he said, "Where ignorant armies clash by night..."). |
| He also tackled questions from whether the collapse of the Ottoman empire and the colonial rule later were in some way responsible for extremism in Islam to resolution of identity conflicts ("discussion will help bring conceptual clarity"). |
| Patient with all, he was then swarmed by admirers who sought his autograph on their copies of the book. |
| The two-hour long session did seem to tire the polymath. A member of the audience complained good-naturedly, "He just put his signature on the book, he did not write my name." |
| To sum up, it was an unforgettable evening when politics, religion and literature mingled with each other to unveil a multi-dimensional view of the world. |
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