AN HONEST AND FIERCE PORTRAIT, SUFFUSED WITH HUMOUR AND SAGACITY, OF WHAT IT IS LIKE TO BE YOUNG AND MUSLIM IN INDIA.

19 September 2008, the Batla House encounter. That one day changed the life of a young man from Inderwan Bairam in Bihar's Gopalganj district. An overprotected childhood in the village, an ambitious migration to Delhi as a young boy for better education, an undisciplined and shiftless adolescence-all of this history is flattened out into one tiny slice of Neyaz Farooquee's identity: Muslim. From Jamia Nagar. Who lived practically next door to the Terrorists who had been killed in the encounter. A Potential Terrorist himself? How, after all, does a man prove that he is (and not merely pretending to be) a Normal Human Being?

Sardonic and wise, Farooquee scrapes out the unvarnished truth about identity and stereotypes, about life in a ghetto, and the small and big disappointments that make up an ordinary life.
A necessary book for our troubled times.