India, April 7 -- While reading this book, I didn't think until the end that the central character was mad. He is, rather, a writer wrestling with the woes of this world. Is he?

The protagonist calls the mental asylum a university and says that knowledge systems fail to explain the things that the asylum has taught him. That's why, ultimately, we end up sitting at the edge of that wall of madness. He says that by going mad, he has learned about the world. The difference between being sane and being truly mad is not something you can explain away by saying "most people are like this." If a single human is mad, you can pronounce him ill. But if an entire country, or an entire community becomes mad, we call it power, we call it politics. Wh...