India Calling

October 1, 2010

Chronicle of how a brave new generation of Indians are re-engaging with the vastly altered land of their parents.

Raised near Cleveland, New York Times contributor Giridharadas worked in Bombay at the international management-consulting firm of McKinsey & Co., where his father was employed early on in America. In this fresh, clear-eyed account of his stay, the author writes eloquently of how he came upon a very different place from where his parents grew up. His father was a Tamil Brahmin who had made his way to America via higher education; his mother was a Punjabi who worked as a French translator. While the author and his sister grew up thoroughly Americanized in the suburbs, they were also keenly attuned to the Indian ways and occasionally visited the relatives in the Old Country. However, what distinguished his family from their counterparts in India was "their perpetual growth and self-renewal," in contrast to the general stasis dictated by caste, heritage and profession. Yet mores were changing fast in India, and Giridharadas records what he saw in terms of the themes—dreams, ambition, pride, anger, love and freedom. He was struck by the new self-confidence in the country. "Indians didn't need their émigrés anymore," he writes. They were beginning to break caste and switch over to professions not practiced by their forebears. One example was Ravindra, a young man from the caste "tasked with crushing oil seeds," who left his village to study English and eventually set up a thriving business offering roller-skating classes. The author looks at the changing manners of the Anglophiles, the class from which his parents emerged, and the new relativity of Indian moral reasoning, and he traces the "circus of money" that prevails in a society such as Hyderabad that now embraces acquisitiveness as vehemently as their parents' had eschewed it. The author met many others determined to challenge the received ideas of their parents.

Giridharadas avidly attests to the new sense of freedom gripping India.

(COPYRIGHT (2010) KIRKUS REVIEWS/NIELSEN BUSINESS MEDIA, INC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.)

October 15, 2010

Giridharadas (columnist, International Herald Tribune) is a first-generation American whose parents migrated from India in the 1970s to "beat the odds of a bad system" in their native country. In a reverse migration, the author now reports on the way in which that system has changed. He argues that there has been a psychological change in India and a revolution in private life as well. Like a morality play, each chapter reflects a different inner quality, while woven together in the narrative are bits of the author's family history. The portraits--a Mumbai migrant worker, a lower-caste entrepreneur who owns finishing schools, the industrialist Mukesh Ambani, a septuagenarian Marxist poet, single working women, and the saga of two brothers--show the myriad ways in which India has changed and yet remains the same. VERDICT Some of the author's conclusions may be debatable to some familiar with India, but overall, the book is well thought out, and it will add to the growing genre of titles about postmillennial India, such as Mira Kamdar's Planet India.--Ravi Shenoy, Naperville P.L., IL

Copyright 2010 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

September 15, 2010
The authors parents, from India, lived a comfortable, professional life in the U.S. Shaker Heights Ohio, Giridharadas says, was a warm and generous place. While growing up, Giridharadas recognized his mother and fathers continued love of their ancestral homeland, but at the same time he witnessed that they accepted and came to savor the American way of life. Hearing an inner call to reverse the migration process of his folks, he flew, as a new college graduate, to Mumbai to work, having already secured a position in the local office of an American management-consulting firm. He plunged into Indian life in the midst of the countrys awakening as an economc and technological giant, as an ancient culture surfacing as a world power. The author is now a New York Times and International Herald Tribune columnist stationed in India. His perambulations around the subcontinent have revealed to him significant aspects of Indias changes to meet modern ways, and this anecdote-rich account of what he did and saw is as well expressed as it is well informed.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2010, American Library Association.)