“Before 1914, the earth had belonged to all,” the Austrian-Jewish writer Stefan Zweig wrote in The World of Yesterday. There were no permits, no visas.”If World War I gave rise to visas and border controls, our own time is rife with walls, detention centres, national registers and citizenship amendment bills. This is the situation that Suketu Mehta surveys in his This Land is Our Land. Mehta recounts tales from the so-called Friendship Park, the only place along the two-thousand-mile U.S.-Mexican border where families can meet face-to-face. This Land Is Our Land; Suketu Mehta, Jonathan Cape/PRH, ₹599.

Source: The Hindu October 19, 2019 11:37 UTC