As horrific as things are in India, I hope people are also seeing the countless good souls working hard online and offline to help those in need. Easy to read grim headlines and imagine that the whole country is going to hell in a handbasket because that confirms our biases. 1/n

Just look at the unprecedented courage, spirit, and labor of everyday folks who are also suffering.

I hope we won't get future novels that rip from these Indian headlines to give us unreal dystopias masquerading as social realism, that lack the necessary research to show + 2/n

+ what things are really like on the ground, and that still get lauded as "books of the year". Yes, there are huge catastrophes happening. But great disasters also bring out greathearted heroes who do more in singular moments than many of us do in our entire lives. 3/n

Please don't succumb to the ease of writing a sociopolitical book that shows a country beyond redemption, where systemic failures are the only topics worthy of depiction. Because that is, really, the writer's failure to see and present a more profound and complex reality. 4/n

And, in my mind, such writerly failure, occurs on both the moral/ethical level and the craft level. That such books then get upheld as representative of the country and the country's literary arts is, well, painful.

(might delete this thread shortly.)

5/n