Professor Amartya Sen interrogates a large number of ideas in currency in the contemporary world including the tendency to categorize individuals and communities based on one overarching identity, clash of civilizations, multiculturalism, the presumed superiority of the West, terrorism emanating from religious fundamentalism and the like. As a review is constrained by limitations of space I shall rest content by discussing some of them.
One of the points which comes for persistent comments in the book is the phenomenon of multiple identities. (In fact identity, role and value orientation are often conflated but I shall let that pass). This is an obvious fact; indeed commonplace. Even if one confines one’s analysis to the institution of family it is clear that a woman can be at once a wife, mother, grandmother, mother-in-law, sister, sister-in-law, daughter, daughter-in-law to list a few. If the relationship between mother-in-law and daughter-in-law is widely perceived to be tension generating, the relationship between mother and daughter is usually not.