Book Review: The Company of Violent Men by Siddharthya Roy
1 min read
Shevlin Sebastian reviews journalist Siddharthya Roy’s book, The Company of Violent Men observing how it focuses on the nether world of terrorists, Maoists, fixers, spies, and people escaping from ethnic strife like the Rohingyas.
In the preface, journalist Siddharthya Roy gives an indication of the people we will meet in his book, The Company of Violent Men. They include ‘militants and refugees, clandestine agents and insurgents, reporters and wheeler-dealers — some extraordinary and some very ordinary individuals caught in circumstances that news headlines, including those of my own stories, have flattened them into convenient tropes of good and evil and us and them.’
Roy continues: ‘These violent men and women I speak of, some of them fight for faith, others fight for power. Many fight just to belong. But peel away the burqa or the badge, scratch the skin of a military officer or a mercenary, and the fears and failings that lie beneath are not so foreign from yours or mine.’
