Probably flogging this to death, this is from a March 5, 2009 review of A. Taseer's first book in Outlook India (available near the bottom of the page here:
http://www.tera-media.net/aatish/?p=reviews )
Then came a turning point. In 2005, Aatish, now a journalist living in London, wrote for a UK magazine on the radicalisation of second-generation British Pakistanis, making the unexceptionable liberal argument that it was linked to failures of identity on different fronts. Chuffed by his first cover story, he sent it to his father—and was shocked to receive a furious reply, accusing him, among other things, of blackening the family name by spreading "invidious anti-Muslim propaganda".
The accusations set off a storm of reactions in Aatish, from hurt and defensiveness, to confusion and curiosity. How was his father who (as he was to recount in his book) "drank Scotch every evening, never fasted and prayed, even ate pork and once said: 'It was only when I was in jail and all they gave me to read was the Koran—and I read it back to front several times—that I realised that there was nothing in it for me'," offended, as a Muslim, by his writings?
His decision to lay bare the personal, says Aatish, came from the conviction that in it lay a bigger story.
The book's slightly cheesy subtitle, 'A son's journey through Islamic lands', has a whiff of opportunistic publisher-speak about it, but there is nothing within its covers to make readers cringe, except perhaps those who find their outrageous utterances reproduced here, like Aatish's dad, or the half-sister who memorably tells him, "Oh I'm so glad you weren't a little black Hindu".
He is wounded by reflexive anti-Indianism,
which he encounters widely in Pakistan, and particularly among the young. ("The people I felt closest to," he told Outlook, "was that older generation who had an idea of a mixed society.") He laments the rejection he finds everywhere of a pluralist subcontinental past, and is dismayed by the growing spread of a narrow version of Islam. The anti-Indianism, he confesses, "made it very difficult to be both Indian and Pakistani." And while stressing that he received great warmth from Pakistanis, he adds: "They would have liked me to turn my back on India and then be theirs. To keep the two was something that was strange and difficult for them."
It is like adding Tabasco over pizza.