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Salman Rushdie’s latest short story, The Old Man in the Piazza, is a moving plea for bringing elegance back to our public discourses. And truth too. It is not the elegance of total assent that is desired. Everyone saying “Yes” to everything all the time is not a utopia. Language sits sulking in a corner of that utopia in Rushdie’s story. She endures the obsequiousness of all the yes-people for five long years and then, unable to bear the vulgarity of such inv...
