Breakfast with Evil and Other Risky Ventures is a pre-emptive attempt to bring together the scattered writings of Ashis Nandy over his entire span of writing career and scan those scattered lectures, interviews, and writings including essays and columns for newspapers and journals for an in-depth analytical study. As the author himself explains, these are not his musings on static, time-bound issues, rather they capture how he confronts and negotiates the living past in the political, social, and cultural landscape of South Asia-starting from the manmade famine of 1943 to the Partition and freedom of India and the birth of Pakistan in 1947, the Bangladesh War in 1971, and the protracted civil war in Sri Lanka (1983-2009). The essays, often written as forewords to other scholars' works, straddle languages, systems of knowledge, and forms of voice and silence. Nandy attempts to identify a critical and intellectual strategy for survival in the Third World. He establishes that though a traumatic ambience-marred by aggressive development, instant nationalisms, or the brutalizing spectacles of modern nation-states-numbs one's imagination, it can also lead to new worldviews and multiple creative forms of resistance.Table of contents BOOK I: This, Our Time (pp. 76) 1.1 The Idea of South Asia: A Note on Post-Bandung Blues (pp. 11) 1.2 The Gift of Partition: The Career of an Idea (pp. 7) 1.3 Is Australia a Victim of the Ethical Limits of the Enlightenment? A Note on the Culture of a State (pp. 7) 1.4 Negotiating Necrophilia in Kashmir (pp. 8) 1.5 Despair, the Missing Rasa (pp. 12) 1.6 From the Age of Anxiety to the Age of Fear (pp. 10) 1.7 Idealism, Ideology and Total Politics (pp. 9) 1.8 Uprooting and the Future Landscape of Clandestine Selves (pp. 6) 1.9 The Peasant (pp. 6) 1.10 The Final Obituary (pp. 7) BOOK II: Negotiating Necrophilia (pp. 59) 2.1 Breakfast with Evil: Vijay Tendulkar on Violence (pp. 6) 2.2 How to Live Happily with Torture (pp. 15) 2.3 Nuclearism: An Epidemiology (pp. 6) 2.4 The Psychiatrist as a Political Critic (pp. 6) 2.5 The Fear and the Lure of Self-Destruction (pp. 8) 2.6 Who Won the World Cup 1994 (pp. 4) 2.7 Invitation to a Beheading: Political Assassinations in the Third World (pp. 8) 2.8 Laughter in a Mortuary (pp. 6) Book III: the work of culture (pp. 82) 3.1 The Fear of Plague: The Inner Demons of a Society (pp. 6) 3.2 Consumerism: Its Hidden Beauties and Politics (pp. 7) 3.3 Coca-Cola: A Peep into its Worldview (pp. 7) 3.4 Sugar: An Incidental Obituary of the Humble Jaggery (pp. 5) 3.5 Solitude 3.6 Ethnic Cuisine (pp. 9) 3.7 Satyajit Ray's India: Cinema, Creativity and Cultural Nationalism (pp 16) 3.8 Hindi Cinema and Its Half-Forgotten Dialects: An Interview by Christopher Pinney (pp.26) Book IV: The Clinical Gaze (pp. 49) 4.1 Infantilization: The Nineteenth-Century Ghosts Haunting 21st-Century Democracies (pp. 9) 4.2 The Psychiatrist as a Social Critic: Ajita Chakraborty: (pp. 9) 4.3 The Psychiatrist as a Political Critic: Daya Somasundaram (pp. 6) 4.4 The Empire Thinks Back, Sometimes Silently (pp. 6) 4.5 Psychoanalytic Sociology and Post-Colonial Predicament: An Interview by Livio Boni (pp. 19) Book V: Shreds of Hope (pp. 82) 5.1 Beyond Brutalization (pp. 14) 5.2 Gandhi after Gandhi (pp. 12) 5.3 Liberation of Those Who Do Not Speak the Language of Liberation (pp.11) 5.4 Freud, Modernity and Violence: Analytic Attitude, Dissent and the Boundaries of Self in Our Times (pp. 21) 5.5 A Trialogue Across Mortality (pp. 10) 5.6 Death of a Phoenix (pp. 4) Conclusion