Saeed Mirza Ko Gussa Kyun Aata Hai

“It’s almost like there is a grand design at work in the world today,” says Saeed Mirza, “and it goes: ‘Thou Shalt Not Think’. We are so obsessed with our short-term interests that larger contexts get lost. And this is true for both individuals and nations.”

- Jai Arjun Singh

Low attention spans, the loss of empathy, the danger of forgetting history’s lessons. These are running themes in the veteran filmmaker and author’s new book Memory in the Age of Amnesia: A Personal History of Our Times. Like Mirza’s earlier Ammi, this is a compilation of reflections and vignettes—some disjointed, some linked. In discussing various manifestations of hegemony and injustice, Mirza moves restlessly across time and space, and everything is grist to his mill: from the 1993 Bombay riots to the rise of the Aam Aadmi Party, from jingoism in India and Pakistan to corruption in mainstream media. Ruminative essays share space with short parables from the Panchatantra or the Mulla Nasruddin stories.

“As a writer, I am not constricted by linearity,” he says, “I like to move from one idea to another and still be comprehensible. I see this book as a big mural. But since it is more political than Ammi was, it had to be palatable as well, not just a dry tract.”