The narrative covers the bloody Tiananmen crackdown, its aftermath and the revival of free-market policies following Deng Xiaoping's famous Southern tour in 1992. Stylistically, Legacy falls halfway between two broad categories of China books and is better for it. In The Colors of Violence, psychoanalyst Kakar seeks to shed light on the communal violence that has plagued India in recent years. The findings are depressing. As the list of atrocities grows, individuals on each side are increasingly drawn into the collective violence.
Tolerance becomes a weakness, and compromise implies a loss of cultural self-esteem.
Escalating Hindu and Muslim nationalist rhetoric provide examples of this process. But the cycle of violence is not irreversible, says Kakar. He returned home to match some of these ideals against the realities of Malaysia. In frequently pungent, occasionally muddled weekly columns in The Sun that have been collected in this slim book, one can see a reculturation taking place. What I've discovered is that these ideas may not be relevant, at least at the moment, to Malaysia.