India Calling: An Intimate Portrait of a Nation's Remaking [Paperback]

Anand Giridharadas (Author)

Book Description

Release date: January 3, 2012

"[A] smart, evocative and sharply observed memoir . . . Giridharadas’s narrative gusto makes the familiar fresh."—The Wall Street Journal

 

 

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, you're going this way?"Giridharadas was returning to the land of his ancestors, amid an unlikely economic boom. But he was more interested in its cultural upheaval, as a new generation has sought to reconcile old traditions and customs with new ambitions and dreams.

 

In India Calling, he brings to life the people and the dilemmas of India today, through the prism of his émigré family history and his childhood memories of India. He introduces us to entrepreneurs, radicals, industrialists, and religious seekers, but, most of all, to Indian families. Through their stories, and his own, he paints an intimate portrait of a country becoming modern while striving to remain itself.

Editorial Reviews

Review

"India Calling is a fine book, elegant, self-aware and unafraid of contradictions and complexity. Giridharadas captures fundamental changes in the nature of family and class relationships and the very idea of what it means to be an Indian."—The New York Times Book Review

"[A] smart, evocative and sharply observed memoir . . . Giridharadas’s narrative gusto makes the familiar fresh."—The Wall Street Journal

"[A] readable, intriguing book . . . [Giridharadas is] a marvelous journalist—intrepid, easy to like, curious . . . India Calling connects us to a new India, and an engaging new voice."—The Plain Dealer (Cleveland)

"A beautifully written, intelligent look at the cultural history and changes of India . . . The book [is] worth reading because of [Giridharadas’s] skill as a writer . . . Giridharadas publishes sentences and paragraphs that are exquisitely worded, to the point of becoming downright memorable, and certainly quotable."—Star Tribune (Minneapolis)

"The moving story of an unexpected romance between a young American and a country he never knew was his to love."—San Jose Mercury News

"Capturing the monumental changes sweeping India is a feat many attempt but few manage . . . In India Calling, Giridharadas has written the best of this now established genre . . . A finely observed portrait of the modern nation."—Financial Times

"Eloquent . . . [Giridharadas’s] gritty and witty pen portraits of a host of Indian characters and places make a great read."—Sunday Herald Sun (Melbourne, Australia)

"Warm, witty and highly perceptive . . . Where Naipaul’s gaze was excoriating, almost half a century later, Giridharadas’s scrutiny, though no less penetrating, is kinder and gentler. In this return of the native genre, India Calling is an honorable successor to Naipaul’s classic [An Area of Darkness]."—The Canberra Times

"Giridharadas successfully uses his first-hand account of self-discovery to illustrate a larger picture of empowering change."—The Christian Science Monitor

"I doubt that there’s any writer today who is a more acute observer of ‘the new India.’"—The Christian Century

"An eminently readable, closely observed book on a fascinating subject . . . [Giridharadas is] the perfect intermediary between Western readers and the world he introduces."—Readings.com.au (Australia)

"Giridharadas offers a fine-grained portrait of what seismic changes mean at the ground level . . .  [and] captures in sharply observed portraits how people react to the gale force of a major change."—Curledup.com

"Rarely has an author deciphered the Indian enigma the way Anand Giridharadas does in India Calling. By lucidly portraying the country's real locomotive—its vast and populous youth—he provides the most timely and elegant guide to perhaps the most important next generation in the world."—Parag Khanna, author of The Second World and How to Run the World

"Anand Giridharadas is more than just a widely admired journalist; with India Calling he has transformed into a fluent, witty, and intelligent writer. His very personal and perceptive look at the new India is a memorable debut, full of insight and diversion."—William Dalrymple, author of Nine Lives: In Search of the Sacred in Modern India

"Anand Giridharadas has become one of the finest analysts of contemporary India. In India Calling, he has produced an engrossing and acutely observed appreciation of a country that is at once old and new—an enormously readable book in which everyone, at home in India or abroad, will find something distinctive and altogether challenging."—Amartya Sen, Nobel laureate in economics

"The emergence of a more dynamic India has been widely observed. Less well understood are the myriad reinventions that make the New India so exciting. In India Calling, Anand Giridharadas renders this change on an intimate scale with a tapestry of keenly observed stories about the changing dreams and frustrations of all walks of Indians—and his own. Savvy and often moving, India Calling is for those who prefer the view from the ground than from thirty thousand feet."—Edward Luce, author of In Spite of the Gods: The Rise of Modern India

"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."—Kirkus Reviews

"Well thought out . . . 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 . . . show the myriad ways in which India has changed and yet remains the same."—Library Journal

About the Author

Anand Giridharadas writes the “Currents” column for the International Herald Tribune and The New York Times online. A native of Cleveland, Ohio, and a graduate of the University of Michigan, he worked in Bombay as a management consultant until 2005, when he began reporting from that city for the Herald Tribune and the Times. He now lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 288 pages
• Publisher: St. Martin's Griffin; Reprint edition (January 3, 2012)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1250001722
• ISBN-13: 978-1250001726
• Product Dimensions: 5.5 x 0.8 x 8.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 7.2 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (44 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #566,631 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Anand Giridharadas is the author of "India Calling: An Intimate Portrait of a Nation's Remaking." He writes the "Currents" column for the International Herald Tribune and The New York Times online. A native of Cleveland, Ohio, and a graduate of the University of Michigan, he worked in Bombay as a management consultant until 2005, when he began reporting from that city for the Herald Tribune and the Times. He now lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

73 of 76 people found the following review helpful

4.0 out of 5 stars An intimate portrait of India's people and their relationships January 11, 2011

By A. Jogalekar TOP 1000 REVIEWERVINE™ VOICE

Format:Hardcover|Amazon Verified Purchase

In "India Calling", Anand Giridharadas takes a different tack from Thomas Friedman and others who have described the now familiar call centers and globalization that have turned India into an economic powerhouse. Instead Giridharadas decides to focus on the country's most important assets- its people and their changing attitudes towards the world, their families and themselves. Giridharadas has an unusual vantage point as an Indian who grew up in the US and who returned back to his country for a fresh look. The book is primarily about how India's new economic, political and social roles have changed Indians' relationships with themselves and their families. The most important consequence of the "New Order" is that Indians whose role in life was traditionally defined for centuries by their birth and their caste, class and gender are now seeking to make their own place in society rather than to "know" it. This is a great thing for a country where identity was defined for hundreds of years by where you came from rather than where you wished to go. As Giridharadas describes, in the new India someone from the lower caste can finally dare to dream beyond what was regarded as his indelible destiny.

To showcase these changing Indian identities, Giridharadas presents us with several "case studies" and describes the life stories of people drawn from a wide slice of Indian society. There's the poor boy in a small village who was born into a lower caste and decides to remake his identity by pioneering English language and "personality development" classes in his village and organizing a personality pageant. There's the "rat-catcher" whose job is to kill dozens of rats in the slums of Mumbai. Then there's the Maoist, a member of the divisive Communist insurgency in India, who resents India's rise to wealth and fame but who has a complex relationship with the country he criticizes. The Maoist interestingly sees parallels between the old caste system and the new globalized order, with labor specialization replacing the role of labor-based caste. And in stark contrast, there's the Ambani family, India's richest business family whose clout extends over the entire Indian economic and political landscape. Giridharadas especially has an insightful portrait of Mukesh Ambani, one of the two Ambani brothers and one of the world's richest men whose empire stretches from petrochemicals to biotechnology. Giridharadas stresses how the Ambanis rose to prominence by cultivating relationships, a strategy that has helped them bribe slothful bureaucrats and journalists in creative ways that include paying for their children's education in Ivy League universities in the US. In an India where bribery is hardly an exception to the rule, the Ambanis' behavior is nothing novel. But one of the signs of a changing India is that while old-timers look with disgust upon the culture of bribery and corruption that the Ambanis have perpetuated, many young people see them as heroes who are cutting India's Gordian knot to an entrenched bureaucracy and socialist ethic and who are inspiring young Indians to dream big.

Further on, it is in describing the changing nature of the Indian family and relationships within it that Giridharadas really excels. Perhaps the two biggest changes in the Indian family during the last few decades have been the declining influence of parents on their children's lives and the empowerment of Indian women in middle-class families. This has led to new challenges and opportunities in the traditional Indian conception of marriage. Women are now regarded as men's equals in marriages and men are no longer supposed to be the sole bread-winners on whom their spouses precariously depend. Changing social mores have also awarded women an independence that was inconceivable for the older generation. Young men and women are now much more comfortable with casual sex and relationships. Indian women are now free to choose who they may or may not marry, or so it may seem. Yet as Giridharadas adeptly demonstrates, reality is more complex. Indian women and even men are still grappling with reconciling the modern with the orthodox. This has led to many of them living strange double lives where they have a wild time outside their homes but can instantly transform themselves into meek and dutiful sons and daughters in the presence of their parents. Ties to parents and family traditions are still too strong for many of India's young people to assert total independence. Thus an Indian woman who otherwise has a boyfriend and dictates the terms of her own life may still end up marrying a boy picked by her parents and sacrificing her freedom. The line between old and new is still not blurry enough for the young to casually transgress it, and it would be interesting to see how the changing dynamic between young people and traditions is played out in 21st century India.

Along with newfound independence come newfound problems. As young people are increasingly defying their parents and marrying for love, they are also increasingly become more intolerant of compromises and sacrifices. This has led to a spiraling divorce rate among young Indian families even as the taboos surrounding the word divorce have been as hard to abolish as that surrounding premarital sex. Giridharadas has a perceptive account of sitting in in an Indian court and watching divorce proceedings. Interestingly, contrary to popular belief, Indian divorces are no longer limited to the wealthy class and Giridharadas watches as a wide economic cross section of husbands and wives airs its woes in court. The reasons why these people are seeking divorce are varied and range from the unsurprising (marital infidelity, plain boredom) to the revealing (the husband becomes jealous when his wife starts making more money and living a more affluent lifestyle). Divorce in India promises to challenge traditional male-female hierarchies in marriage and social customs as acutely as any other modern liberating tendency.

As insightful as Giridharadas's book is, I have some minor complaints. Firstly, he says nothing about the negative repercussions of lowering standards in the educational system to accommodate the previously underprivileged. Liberation from the shackles of caste has been a wonderful thing for India, but on the flip side it has led politicians with vested interests to lower the standards of public education rather than to raise the standards of the lower castes through improvements in primary education. This is engendering divisive sentiments which the author does not discuss. Secondly, while Giridharadas eloquently describes changing perceptions of caste and class, he says almost nothing about how the changing dynamic has impacted religion and religious relationships which have always been a key part of the Indian identity. Thirdly, while he makes sincere attempts to be objective, Giridharadas cannot completely escape the biases of an Indian who did not grow up in India and who is coming back after a long time to inspect his former country much as an anthropologist would inspect a tribe. On one hand this has led him to offer us some fresh, out of the box perspectives, but on the other hand it has led him to quickly generalize from his own limited experiences. Indian is a complex and vast country, and even an observation that might apply to seventy percent of its citizens would still exclude a very significant portion of the population. Thus Giridharadas's observations should always be accepted as containing a significant element of truth but not the whole truth. Lastly, I found Giridharadas to be slightly verbose and rambling. Sometimes he seems to be too much in love with his words and phrases and belabors a point in too many different ways. This would have been fine for a work of fiction but it can tend to bore the reader and obscure clarity in a work of non-fiction.

Notwithstanding these minor gripes, I would strongly recommend the book. In a stream of books that have told us about India's economic and political rise, Giridharadas makes a valuable and rare contribution by focusing on the most important aspect of any country- its people and their changing relationships with themselves, their nation and the world.

33 of 37 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Snapshots from a country formerly on the periphery January 17, 2011

By Niftyfriend

Format:Hardcover|Amazon Verified Purchase

OK so I am the idiot thirty-something conservative, white American whose limited understanding of India comes from a few novels by Salman Rushdie, Bend It Like Beckham, Slumdog Millionaire and Friedman's "The World is Flat". I stumbled across the author's "Currents" column accidentally half a year ago and have been a fan since. Like another reviewer, after finishing "India Calling", I tracked down the author at one of his Bay Area book appearances where a few of my questions were answered.

The book is not an attempt to be a representative sample of the "Indian" story. Rather he provides vivid (and at times graphic) snapshots of his family and a few others (mostly men) and how they are dealing with the changes in India's economy in the mid 2000s. To different extents, he writes of his experiences of an entrepreneur, a cab driver, a Bollywood actor turned rat exterminator, billionaires and servants.

He explained at his appearance that the in depth few profiles of women were not oversights. Aside from Maleeka (a banker) introduced 180 pages into it, and Deepti (an expatriate living in London), the author attempted to interview middle and lower class women living in India. He attempted to talk to female servants and family members but societal norms prevented them from answering personal questions from a twenty-something male stranger. At his appearance he said it is relatively easy to capture a brief quote or a short soundbite for a newspaper or radio interview, but impossible to get the same woman to answer personal questions about family and relationships.

For the most part I liked his turn of phrases. So maybe "impotence to omnipotence" has been used in other contexts by other writers, but it worked in a story about dealing with servants and I liked the alliteration. As a tennis junkie, I liked the quote about how "tennis like romance, is not a sport made for three." However, in light of his comments about open marriage (fortunately without a reference to doubles play) made later in the book- the romance quip could have been cut.

The book also strayed when the author tried to contextualize one of the profiles in a larger religious context. At one point he started comparing India, to Kant and to Judeo-Christian beliefs, and unfortunately this sounded like a page pulled from a masters thesis. Having some familiarity with Kant and Christian apologetics, that section was jarring. During his appearance he said he tried to keep sprituality out of it. However his book included a profile of a young believer.

I had heard the author give a few interviews, and as media savvy as the author is, I was caught off guard by how soft spoken he is in person. The images and descriptions in "India Calling" are bold, vivid and penetrating, it was disconcerting that those words came from someone barely larger than some of my waif running friends, who needed a microphone to be heard barely four rows back in large conference room. This is not a critique of the author, but more of a reflection of the biases of a large, loud American who expected his physical voice to match the literary one, and a reason microphones were designed.

One of the critiques often fired at the author is that he is an NPR elitist using his Indian background as a soapbox- I disagree. The author is fresh voice for twenty and thirty-somethings. I continue to look forward to his work.

19 of 21 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars India: The unknown at the heart of what you think you knew February 8, 2011

By Marylene Delbourg-Delphis

Format:Hardcover|Amazon Verified Purchase

Read this book:
- If you are doing business with India. It will help you to scope out the realm of what you don't know, and make you start to listen to others in order to build meaningful relationships within a complex culture.
- Or, if you like literature, read this book as a collection of intertwined short stories!

Say you've worked and socialized with Indians for the last ten or fifteen years in America - does it help you to understand what India is about when you travel over there for a business trip? Maybe a little, but no more than that. India is a complex, multi-dimensional country with an intricately layered culture, where ancestral thinking models may seep into the most seemingly standard ways of doing business, often unbeknownst to the newcomer and even to his/her Indian host. That is, in a nutshell, what Anand Giridharadas's India Calling is about.

Anand's book is a deep foray into the human, social, and business fabrics of modern India. Born in Cleveland, Ohio from Indian parents who came to the US in the 1970's, and a graduate from the University of Michigan, he felt like a stranger when he came back to work in his parents' homeland in the early 2000's, reversing his parents' path. His autobiographical story is the analysis of his disorientation, the dismemberment of what he thought he knew through his parents' stories and visits to relatives as a child, as well as the anatomy of the image he had subconsciously formed about this quickly changing country from an American standpoint.

As you move through the six simple words that title each chapter of this book (Dreams, Ambition, Pride, Anger, Love and Freedom), you find out that these words do not depict a simple reality, but are instead huge baskets of interwoven cultural threads. Having become a journalist, Anand landed himself into an unexpected challenge: "it was terrific to have gotten the job, but how was I supposed to explain to others a country that I had to explain to myself."

Within each chapter, the multiple protagonists that Anand meets either purposedly or haphazardly embody India's self-invention, the stepping-in of people onto the fast-moving train of progress that distances them from the past. Yet, you see the uncanny capability of that past to come back like an agile animal. Methodically and incrementally, for instance, Ravindra moves away from his initial fate on an entrepreneurial track, as he goes through each of the stations toward the project of his life, the "project of himself" that he has so thoroughly planned. But can you plan everything? No: "It had not occurred to him that a woman, unlike an exam is not conquered simply by willling that you get her," Anand notes. Ravindra leaves a telling message to the author: "Life sometimes becomes so selfish that it wants everything. And while trying 4 everything we miss something that is worth everything." His "dream home" stands in front of the Hindu temple, a sobering reminder that not everything is about growth and success, that human beings do not make their way through one single time-dimension, but live on an unsteady vista point at the intersection of multiple fault lines.

Regardless of who they are and what they do, Anand's encounters embody complexity. So hold off on any judgment. Depending on how you look at it, Mukesh Ambani and many others are moral, amoral, or even immoral. It's not simply because the context-based ethics of dharma continues to compete with the occidental view of fairness, it's also because the traditional caste system simultaneously morphs into new tribal values (where village-based allegiance may come across as influence peddling, for example). As dreams turn into ambition and ambition into pride, as "capitalism has transfixed the Indian imagination," and as Hyderabad and its forrest of billboards herald a promised land, anger is also looming. Anand meets with the Maoist insurgent Varavara Rao and, then, his nephew Venugopal: he too has a dream - the dream of purging Indians from their "bad elements," both the old and the new ones, yet, "his own story was one of the oldest patterns of all: the Brahmin sitting high on his perch, imagining how the peasants down below should live." History looks like a continuous cycle of reincarnations moving away from a past that is defined by either what you want to forget, as is Ravindra's case, or what you want to resurrect, as is Anand's quest.