Time Magazine’s Asia edition writes a favorable review of the new book by Amitav Ghosh titled, Incendiary Circumstances : A Chronicle of the Turmoil of Our Times:

…moments of collapse, when the writer realizes what he cannot do—and what he has to do, as a citizen—are the center of the roaming anthropologist’s new collection of essays, Incendiary Circumstances. The title comes from a piece in which Ghosh, sitting at his desk in Delhi, working on his first novel, in 1984, suddenly sees the tranquil world around him go up in flames in the wake of Indira Gandhi’s assassination. Hours before, he was just another student and aspiring author, hovering over his notebook in a part of Delhi called Defence Colony; overnight, he becomes an activist of sorts, going out into the streets to shout Gandhian slogans with the other everyday citizens trying to quell the riots.

It is part of Ghosh’s curious luck that he often seems to be in the thick of things: he was a schoolboy in Sri Lanka just before civil war broke up the island, and he was living in rural Egypt when villagers around him started going to Saddam Hussein’s Iraq in search of jobs. He was in New York City on Sept. 11, 2001. The disappearance of seeming paradises has been his lifelong companion. More than that, though, he is an amphibian of sorts who knows what it is to be both witness and victim.

Reading the review I was reminded a little of this question I posed to Manish just a few days ago. When is the time to write about and discuss an issue over, and the time to to either act on it or walk away at hand? Sometimes writing can inspire the cause that will produce a needed effect. Ghosh seems to focus on this balance.

Faced by those rioters in Delhi in 1984, some women stood up to them and, miraculously, reversed the tide of violence. Following the destruction of their country by the Khmer Rouge, a handful of survivors in Cambodia in 1981 put on a dance performance, piecing their lives together like “rag pickers.” Writers have to be solitaries, Ghosh recalls V.S. Naipaul saying, and yet, he seems to feel, to be useful they have to be participants, too.

Incendiary Circumstances traces, over and over, the perfidy of empires and the corruption of most governments, but it never loses sight of individual action and power. And navigating both sides of the shadow lines within him, Ghosh travels to some of the most difficult places on earth to bring their voices back to those in places of seeming comfort.

See Amardeep’s review of Ghosh’s previous book, The Hungry Tide.