India Calling : An Intimate Portrait Of A Nation\'s Remaking
Contents: 1. Dreams. 2. Ambition. 3. Pride. 4. Anger. 5. Love. 6. Freedom. Epilogue: Midnight. Acknowledgements. Index. About the author.
Reversing his parents’ immigrant path, a young American-born writer returns to India and discovers an old country making itself new.
Anand Giridharadas sensed something was afoot as his plane from America prepared to land in Bombay. An elderly passenger looked at him and said, We’re all trying to go that way, pointing to the rear. You, he added, as if seeking to alert him to a ticketing error, you’re going this way?
Giridharadas returned to India amid an unlikely economic boom he was interested less in its gold rush than in its cultural upheaval, as a new generation sought to reconcile old traditions and customs with new ambitions and dreams.
In India Calling, one of the most vivid and perceptive accounts of the country in recent memory, Giridharadas journeys through India, artfully documenting change and conflict through keenly observed stories. He writes of a dynamic low-caste man in a small town who pulls himself up into the new India; of a progressive urban woman torn between her desires and the wishes of her parents; of a lonely man in Punjab who clings to old notions of honour even as money replaces it as the currency of prestige; of a part-time revolutionary who worked as a journalist by day and a Naxalite by night; of Mukesh Ambani, perhaps the most powerful private citizen of India, whose success speaks of an Indian free from it colonial baggage.
Telling these stories through the prism of his own emigre family history and his childhood memoirs of India, Giridharadas shows how India is reinventing itself: how parents and children, husbands and wives, cousins and siblings are seizing hold of their destinies, bending the meaning of Indianness, and enduring the pangs of the old birthing the new.
The result is this remarkable debut: an intimate portrait of a country becoming modern while striving to remain itself.
Reversing his parents’ immigrant path, a young American-born writer returns to India and discovers an old country making itself new.
Anand Giridharadas sensed something was afoot as his plane from America prepared to land in Bombay. An elderly passenger looked at him and said, We’re all trying to go that way, pointing to the rear. You, he added, as if seeking to alert him to a ticketing error, you’re going this way?
Giridharadas returned to India amid an unlikely economic boom he was interested less in its gold rush than in its cultural upheaval, as a new generation sought to reconcile old traditions and customs with new ambitions and dreams.
In India Calling, one of the most vivid and perceptive accounts of the country in recent memory, Giridharadas journeys through India, artfully documenting change and conflict through keenly observed stories. He writes of a dynamic low-caste man in a small town who pulls himself up into the new India; of a progressive urban woman torn between her desires and the wishes of her parents; of a lonely man in Punjab who clings to old notions of honour even as money replaces it as the currency of prestige; of a part-time revolutionary who worked as a journalist by day and a Naxalite by night; of Mukesh Ambani, perhaps the most powerful private citizen of India, whose success speaks of an Indian free from it colonial baggage.
Telling these stories through the prism of his own emigre family history and his childhood memoirs of India, Giridharadas shows how India is reinventing itself: how parents and children, husbands and wives, cousins and siblings are seizing hold of their destinies, bending the meaning of Indianness, and enduring the pangs of the old birthing the new.
The result is this remarkable debut: an intimate portrait of a country becoming modern while striving to remain itself.
