The Illusion of Identity

A child that grows up in the island of Mauritius is exposed to all sorts of cultures. Only later did I come to realise how impressive a feat attempting Bernard Pivot’s televised spelling competition, after watching (and understanding every little word of) a Bollywood movie, actually was. The country’s diversity is a cause for celebration. It does cause its fair share of grief and the occasional ethnic tension but never any violence. In many parts of the world, blood is shed by people who clash over identity. Nobel laureate Amartya Sen, author of ‘Identity and Violence: The Illusion of Destiny,’ destroys two fallacies about identity: the beliefs that an individual possesses one and only one identity and that this identity is merely inherited.