Last week, in an email a good friend informed me that he had finished reading Moshin Hamid's novel "A Reluctant Fundamentalist". To spike my interest, he also added that Mr. Hamid worked in the same kind of job I am currently employed in, and even more intriguingly for the very same firm in the 1999 - 2000-ish period, and that he had used the business world as seen through the context of this firm as an entry point for his novel.

The latter piece of news, for the obvious reasons, thrilled me quite a bit for it for it held out hope that I might still disentangle myself from the business of business, and transfer my complete allegiance to the country of writing. This also meant that I had to go to bookstore and discover what Mr. Hamid had to say in his book. However since I didn't go the big chain bookstore here, I couldn't lay my greedy hands on this novel. So in lieu of that I Googled Mr. Hamid, and ended up reading this essay he had written for the Asian edition of the Time Magazine. I felt a sudden kinship to Hamid when I read this passage:

"I think about why so many of my friends left Lahore and why so few of us returned. None of us seemed to think, at the time, that we were going away for good. The universities were in bad shape, and we went abroad for a better education. But as the economy stagnated and as law and order declined, we delayed our homecomings. We began to work. We began to settle into new lives. And as the years passed, it became harder and harder for us to think of what we would do if we went back to Lahore. The city changed and we changed, and somehow we became voluntary exiles. But at least in my case, the homesickness that resulted from exile, although not fatal, has remained uncured."

And I thought I had invented that set of words in bold! So kind reader, in revenge, Hamid's novels will now be hunted down by yours truly.

i am very much looking forward to reading this (just blogged about his sparring with d. solomon in the NYT last week)--his first book Moth Smoke is rather good, also.