The author straddles many fracture lines: Hindu-Muslim, India-Pakistan in the subcontinent, western education and Indian cultural roots, and so on. He makes an honest attempt to come to India, to access the Hindu-Indian-traditional part of his civilizational heritage, and that too to the centre of traditional Hindu, Sanskrit learning, the Brahmins of Banaras in the Ganges valley. Here he meets up with both men on the street (Brahmins of the present age), as well as tradition-bound scholars, some of them schooled strictly in the traditional ways, and some who know also the world of modern linguistic and philosophical scholarship. But he is defeated, ultimately, by the lack of self-awareness, the mistaken conviction that the scriptures contain all knowledge, the absence of a critical understanding of what the British (and for that matter the Muslim) interludes and interactions have meant, and the lack of any future prospects for the purely backward-looking world view of his contacts. He decides he is better off in the west, where there is an element of rationality and more productive civilizational values of the Enlightenment and the respect for the individual. In this, he confirms the reaction that most modern English-schooled Indians have to the uglier manifestations of the current Hindutva movement in India. ( )