Troubled Parts of the World [Ghosh]

From 'The Ghosts of Mrs. Gandhi', in Incendiary Circumstances, Amitav Ghosh.

When I now read descriptions of troubled parts of the world, in which violence appears primordial and inevitable, a fate to which masses of people are largely resigned, I find myself asking, Is that all there was to it? Or is it possible that the authors of these descriptions failed to find a form -- or a style or a voice or a plot -- that could accommodate both violence and the civilized willed response to it?

The truth is that the commonest response to violence is one of repugnance and that a significant number of people try to oppose it in whatever ways they can. That these efforts rarely appear in accounts of violence is not surprising; they are too undramatic.