City Of Fear: Staying Normal in Abnormal Times - Paperback

by Robin David (Author)

An extraordinary account of ordinary people in troubled times In 2001, a calamitous earthquake struck Gujarat. A year later came the kind of communal carnage the nation had not seen since the Partition. For Robin David, then an assistant editor with the Times of India, the two events engendered a tectonic shift in his own life. The earthquake left deep cracks in his ancestral home, while the riots undermined all the certainties of life, making it impossible to walk through hitherto familiar neighbourhoods. A decade later, the wounds have not healed. At a time when the memory of the riots has already faded in the minds of many, City of Fear documents the varied forms of fear that people in Gujarat experienced during that period, especially those of the author's own Indian Jewish Bene Israeli family.

Author Biography

Robin David is The Times of India's resident editor in Chandigarh. He previously worked with the newspaper in Ahmedabad, the city that forms the backdrop of this novel. He belongs to its small Bene Israel Jewish community. His first book, City of Fear, an account of how the 2002 Gujarat riots affected him and his mother, noted writer Esther David, was shortlisted for the Vodafone Crossword Book Award 2007 in the English non-fiction category.