Fiction can either be a mirror reflecting you back to yourself or it can be a clean pane of glass looking on the outside.
Nostalgia can be extremely powerful in the right hands: think of the intense longing in the films Andrei Tarkovsky made after he left the U.S.S.R. They wring your soul.
Meat-fetishiser that I was, I used to find willed vegetarianism inexplicable. It was one thing to be a vegetarian because of religious and caste reasons - something I was familiar with because of my Indian upbringing - but to choose to be a vegetarian when you could eat meat for every meal every day? That seemed madness to me.
India introduced Britain to vegetarianism - see Tristram Stuart's excellent first book on this - and it is possible, indeed all too easy, to be a vegetarian in India and eat extraordinarily good, varied food every day, with very few 'repeats.'
The Naxalite revolution - an ultra-left Maoist movement - in Bengal, and elsewhere in India, in the late 1960s provides one strand of 'The Lives of Others.'
I grew up in financially straitened circumstances and meat, which was expensive, was a rare thing at mealtimes. We ate meat about once a month, if that.
