Dangerous Minds

Dangerous Minds is S. Hussain Zaidi's look at the private lives of several terrorists whose names became known across India. It asks how people who seemed ordinary came to carry out acts of mass violence, and it follows each of them from their early years through their working lives to the point where something changed.

Dr Jalees Ansari, a physician from Malegaon, was seen as a quiet, peaceable man devoted to his profession. He has been linked to some eighty blasts, among them attacks on railway tracks. Fahmida Ansari was a mother of two who kept house in the Jogeshwari slums of north-west Mumbai. She planted bombs herself in a bus and in taxis, then went home as though it had been a normal day.

The book returns again and again to the same questions. What pushed these people toward such plans, and what pressures did they feel? How can someone be so cold toward other human beings? Zaidi looks for answers in the backgrounds and turning points of his subjects rather than in the attacks alone.