Amitav Ghosh links climate events to 'political monsters' in new book

For writer Amitav Ghosh and his family, September 11, 2001 was an important day, as his 10-year-old daughter Lila was set to join a new school, one that faced the World Trade Centre.

- Jasjeev Gandhiok

NEW DELHI: From her history class, little Lila, on her first day of school, witnessed an act so monstrous that the world shuddered - two planes hijacked by terror outfit al-Qaeda crashed into the twin towers of the WTC.

Twenty-four years later, at the India International Centre (IIC), Ghosh recalled how he frantically rushed to pick her up, and said, "On that day, I felt like I was watching another turn in a cycle of history that I had observed from many angles - India, the United States and the Middle East."

At the launch of his latest book, Wild Fictions (Essays) at IIC, where he also delivered the CD Deshmukh Memorial lecture on "Time of Monsters, Time of Possibilities: Reflections of an Interstitial era," Ghosh quoted Italian Marxist philosopher Antonio Gramsci, and said that the world was entering a "time of monsters."