‘The Non-Essential Ashis Nandy’ is essential reading for our times. Especially for the young Clues, partial answers and starting directions to solving some of the great puzzles and questions playing out in India today. Ashis Nandy How do we tell the story of an age? In a way that makes it come alive? Do we find these stories in magisterial histories, such as Ramachandra Guha’s India After Gandhi? In epochal novels like Charles Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities? Or in the works of memoirists who situate the personal within the sweepingly historical? When I’m asked to review Ashis Nandy’s