When I was growing up in the un-liberal India of the 1970s-80s, starting with Hollywood films such as Ben-Hur and Gone with the Wind and going onto On Golden Pond and Deer Hunter combined with the often bleak and funny literature by J.D. Salinger or Joseph Heller created an exotic "abroad" or "Other" in my mind. For a young Indian like me, westernised angst was more compelling than humdrum Indian reality. This other preferable world I imagined also had tremendous dissonance with shrill-sounding Hindi melodramas while Indian English literature was still in its incipient stages.