Join us for the next RAS Book Club session, where Pallavi Aiyar will talk about the anthology Thousand Cranes for India: Reclaiming Plurality Amid Hatred, which she edited.

Please note that this month's book club session will only be held online.

About the Book

In Japan there is a legend that anyone who folds one thousand paper cranes will have their wishes realized. But folding cranes, and the meditative, solemn care that it involves, has come to mean more than just an exercise in wish making. Origami cranes have become a symbol of renewal, atonement, and warning. Their symbolism may have emerged out of Japan's particular mythology and history, but they do not belong to any one nation. The crane is a migratory bird that crosses borders and makes its home with scant regard to the blood-soaked lines that humans have drawn on maps.

This anthology uses origami cranes as a way for some of India's best-known writers, poets, and artists to form a shared civic space for a conversation about the fault lines in India at a time of darkness. The twenty-three pieces collected here encompass reportage, stories, poems, memoir, and polemic—the kind of complex and enriching diversity that India demands and deserves. The paper crane becomes a motif of connection, beauty, and reclamation in an otherwise degraded country, enabling those who fight with words to become the best army they can be.

About Pallavi Aiyar

Pallavi Aiyar is an award-winning journalist and author who has reported from China, Europe, Indonesia, and Japan. She has contributed to the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, the South China Morning Post, the Wall Street Journal, Granta, and The Wire among many other publications. She is the author of multiple books including the award-winning China memoir, Smoke and Mirrors, the novel Chinese Whiskers, and on contemporary crises, Punjabi Parmesan: Dispatches from a Europe in Crisis. She has been a member of the World Economic Forum's Global Future Council on Information, Media, and Entertainment, and was selected as a Young Global Leader by the Forum in 2014.

Aiyar has first class degrees from Delhi University, Oxford University, the London School of Economics, and the University of Southern California. She currently resides in Madrid.