Samar's Brahmin pedigree holds him aloof from India's squalor but connects him to nothing else.

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It would be surprising if Samar and Jayojit were the last fictional Brahmins to wrestle with their changing land.

ECONOMIST: Indian fiction: Disconnected | The

Samar's sense of estrangement eventually becomes the reader's response to the book.

ECONOMIST: Indian fiction: Disconnected | The

Two women were named to posts -- Sima Samar, one of five deputy premiers as minister of women's affairs, and Suhaila Seddiqi as health minister.

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While Al Youssef believes there is no appetite from either King Abdullah or society at large for greater women's rights, Samar Fatany is convinced of the opposite.

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Jayojit Chatterjee, older but perhaps not much wiser or more at home than Samar, draws us in to the constricted goings-on of one Calcutta household without stepping out of the scene.

ECONOMIST: Indian fiction: Disconnected | The

Samar begins and ends the novel in troubled equidistance.

ECONOMIST: Indian fiction: Disconnected | The

In June, Sima Samar, the former minister for women's affairs, was summoned before a court for blasphemy, after allegedly telling a Canadian magazine that she did not believe in sharia, the Islamic law.

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When Major Littleton Waller, of the Marines, appeared before a court-martial in Manila that month, unprecedented public attention fell on the brutal extremities of U.S. combat, specifically on the island of Samar in late 1901.

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Nor are they likely to, though on May 25th, Mr Karzai's women's affairs minister, Sima Samar, who is responsible for drafting the guidelines for a human-rights commission, insisted there should be no amnesties for militia leaders accused of abuses, even if they support the government.

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