The same evening, the young student goes out and buys one for himself, shells the monocle lens off the frame, and reads his textbook before the mirror, practising his w’s and v’s, making sure he keeps them straight. One of the first professors he sees in the lecture-hall uses a monocle to review his notes.

Even worse are the out-of-place Indian hand gestures that accompany their Indian English, the figure-eights their heads make when they say yes, their inability to eat pork sausages with the white students as if pig were no different than mutton or beef. Some pass all their tests but fail their auditions as Englishmen, their tongues never quite writhing out of their accents. London is full of the sons of wealthier Indians, studying business or medicine or law. Something about him takes naturally to acting. So what if he is a common merchant’s son from Karachi, picked out for his quick tongue? His look is princely. Subtract three thousand cigarettes from his body, and his beauty grows delicate. Regress Mohammed Ali Jinnah, father of Pakistan, back to a law student in London. Gandhi, the religious visionary in homespun khadi, experiments with Truth in his quest for one India-only to witness, in anguish, the bloody birth of two nations.ġ893. Jinnah, the consummate, ruthlessly analytical gentleman in a tailored suit, starts out sceptical of those who come to his door proposing a ‘Land of the Pure’, but ends up founding exactly such a country.Two intense, inflexible personalities duel over a question that will decide the fate of millions: one nation-or two?.The book “The Map and the Scissors” by Amit Majmudar is about the epic origin story of modern South Asia, brought to life by two London-educated lawyers, mirror-image rivals who dreamt the same dream of freedom-in catastrophically incompatible ways.

Running with scissors novel