Nobody expected it at the Kovalam Litfest. It felt so relaxed that you chatted with strangers as with friends. And yet here was a bearded, elderly man in the row behind mine raging at the Israeli playwright Savyon Liebrecht. Wagging a finger, ignoring all reprimands, he tried to establish through persistence alone that he knew, if nobody else did, how terrible were the Jewish people because he had lived in Germany for thirty years and they had been awful to him and this proved that they deserved the Holocaust. The festival organisers managed to put the lid on him — only for the moment as it later turned out — but that moment was occupied by another voice: “Why you are still stuck in the past Madam? Why you don’t think of the future? The Germans have the best brains. They make the best machines. They make the best films. Why you are stuck with the Holocaust?” (In another context, this could have been Modi’s question: “Look how much I have done for Gujarat. Why you a...