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15 of 18 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Eye Opening, April 19, 2011
Customer review from the Amazon Vine™ Program (What's this?)
I really enjoyed this book. Although its purpose was somewhat different, I found myself thinking: This is what Eat, Pray, Love could have been. I mean that Miranda Kennedy's new book is not self-absorbed, not overly packaged, and not glossily superficial in its conclusions. I also did not find it boring in the least (I believe another reviewer had that experience.)
Several things struck me very positively about Sideways on a Scooter. First of all, I now have insights into the Indian culture that I might never have had; and not big-stroke, world-stage, political/economic insights, as much as intricate and human insights. I really enjoyed getting to know the people, the neighborhoods, and the customs Ms. Kennedy encountered as a young foreign correspondent. One moment I was shocked, the next touched. I shook my head in dismay, and rooted whole-heartedly for the underdogs - the upwardly non-mobile, the jaded, the cats. I rooted for Ms. Kennedy too, the young woman desperately seeking independence and belonging at the same time.
There was a little ambiguity at moments in terms of past/present orientation, but I have to say that I much prefer that to slick and overly controlled. This book felt ever so slightly messy, and I easily became comfortable with the medium being the message. There were no tidy lives in Sideways on a Scooter.
The book ends rather quietly and perhaps with almost too little denouement. But there is an epilogue, which is pretty satisfying for those of us who want to know how things have gone since then. I felt a little like giving the book a hug at the end. In fact I think I may have.
Would I recommend this to a friend? Yes, especially if that friend were female and interested in other cultures, or in the bold and trembling adventures of youth.
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32 of 44 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars
AWARDED......The worst book on India in the last decade!, June 30, 2011
First of all don't be awed by so many good reviews - if you look at the reviews closely you will notice that more than 80% of them are from the Amazon Vine program in which free copies of the book are distributed to a lot of people and they are asked to post reviews on Amazon, most of which generally tend to be positive. Most people who reviewed this book got it for free- there are only a few idiots like me who actually purchased this book! I didn't see any review of this book in the NYT or Washington Post or the Wall Street Journal or The Economist (or any other high quality print publication) - even though these publications are eager to review any decent book on India, which should have warned me. The author keeps making inaccurate generalizations about a mind-bogglingly heteregenous country of 1.2 billion people based on less than a dozen (rather strange) people she met in Delhi - there is no attempt of any kind to engage with the diversity of India. A lot of it has to do with the age and immaturity of the author along with her surprisingly ethnocentric attitudes - her way of analyzing and interpreting things is that of a high school teenager of average intelligence. In a more sensible day and age, no publisher would have given her a book contract.
(I teach in an university and specialize in South Asian history and politics). Quite simply, this is the worst book on India that I have read in the last several years- and I have read dozens! (See the very last paragraph of this review for my recommendations). You will know less about India after you finish reading this book than you did before! The major problem is the following. You could write a book on India (or any foreign country) in the following two ways
1) You visit India and you write about your experiences there finding a way to make it interesting. In this case, you are not particularly concerned about political or cultural issues related to the country - your primary focus is on your personal experiences.
2) You bill yourself as an expert on India and you are helping others understand/interpret the country.
The problem with this book is that it fails on both levels. It fails on 1) because her personal experiences in India are not particularly interesting - Ms. Kennedy clearly hated the time that she spent in India and it shows. And it failed on Level 2 because her efforts to project herself as an expert on India falls flat- she clearly doesn't have a small fraction of the knowledge necessary to do this successfully - even on Indian history, she often gets her dates and facts wrong.
One of the threads running through the book is a constant attempt to project India as the "heart of darkness". Apart from her complete (and misleading) obsession with the caste system and trying to see everything Indian in terms of that, this book is full of comic and somewhat offensive caricatures of India and Indians of a type that I thought would have been common only in an earlier less enlightened age. When the caricatures are not offensive, they are just plain ridiculous - like "Indian women are not supposed to smile at their weddings" or "People of different castes have different types of cuisines in India" and so on. Another major problem is her tendency to patronize anyone she comes in touch with. She chose not to publish the book in India, because the Indian people she insists on calling "friends" in this book would have filed defamation lawsuits against the way they have been portrayed!
We are much better at having a dialogue between cultures/civilizations today than we were a century ago, but it is easy to overstate the extent of this progress. Many years back, when I first came to do a PhD in United States, I was puzzled when more than one American stranger asked me about my caste as the first or second question after being introduced. (not the kind of Americans I met on my university campus, but you know...others). After reading such books being published in 2011, I understand why they behaved the way they did. I grew up in an urban middle class family in Calcutta and I never knew what my caste was because my parents never told me anything about it or it wasn't otherwise relevant. This didn't change even when I went to college and university or later in life. Now that doesn't mean that caste or caste based politics is completely irrelevant in urban India - but the reality is quite different than the kind of uniformly oppressive society that Ms Kennedy projects India as being. One reviewer says that he/she got some "insights" into India by reading this book which actually scares me a little! From my perspective, the world would be a better place if we were able to form more nuanced perspectives on other countries/cultures and if we took less delight in the sense of smugness and/or superiority that many of us feel when we are able to look down at people of other cultures/races or see them through definite negative stereotypes that are a gross distortion of reality.
Don't get me wrong - I am all for a critical perspective, and caste and gender discrimination are indeed very serious problems in Indian society - but hyperbole or misleading generalizations based on limited personal experiences cannot substitute for analysis. I know of virtually no major expert on India (Western or Indian) who will agree with the author's opinion that modern Indian society should be compared with pre Civil War era American South. Careful international academic studies which seek to document/measure discrimination show that caste discrimination in urban India is about as bad as discrimination against African-Americans in the US today. (though in some rural areas it is far worse, but things are improving). And in political empowerment, India's record is better than the US - lower caste people are reasonably well integrated into India's political power structure. (though it is so partly because of a quota for seats in the national Parliament and state legislatures mandated by affirmative action policies). Christophe Jaffrelot, a top expert on Indian politics at the prestigious Sciences Po in Paris calls the continuing empowerment of the lower castes "India's silent revolution". (He has a book of the same name which I recommend). However, this is far from being the only issue that the author misrepresents.
There has been an explosion of interest in China and India over the last decade and too many people are trying to make a fast buck by capitalizing on this boom. Fortunately, there are quite a few general interest good books on India out there. I would recommend "In spite of the Gods: The strange rise of modern India" by Edward Luce and "India calling" by Anand Giridhardas and also the recent book by Patrick French called "India: A portrait". Edward Luce was the South Asia bureau chief of the Financial Times - his book is fascinating and would be an excellent starting point. Patrick French is a British historian specializing in modern India- his book was released only a few months back. If you want to be intellectually challenged (while having a good time!) read V.S Naipaul's book "India: A Million Mutinies Now" - which remains a classic. If you are more into post-independence Indian politics, read "India after Gandhi" by Ramachandra Guha. AND "Religion, Caste and Politics in India" by Christophe Jaffrelot. The last book is a collection of Jaffrelot's articles on Indian politics over the last 15 years, which includes lot of serious analysis on caste - not the kind of mud slinging that this author engages in. Jaffrelot's books are somewhat academic, but should still be accessible to a deeply interested casual reader. These books discuss India's many failings in great detail - and they are sometimes brutally critical of India (as we should be as well wishers), but these authors, unlike Ms Kennedy, are also real experts on India- they have a lot of knowledge on Indian politics, society and economy which helps them in interpreting their experiences intelligently.
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3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Better than 5 stars, June 22, 2011
This is a fascinating, insightful book--as gripping as a good novel--because it gives the reader an intimate glimpse into the hearts and minds of several Indian women navigating their lives in a country that's still bound by caste and tradition but modernizing at a dizzying pace. There's lively, charismatic Geeta, a "modern girl", who is nevertheless torn between hoping for a marriage arranged by her parents and finding herself a love match. Parvati, another highly opinionated friend of author Miranda Kennedy, chain smokes in spite of its stigma and has more contemporary notions about caste, love and marriage, but because of her unique situation these ideas are influenced by living in a reality that is very different from that of most Americans. Besides these friends, Kennedy had two household servants whose lives she becomes deeply involved in, one a proud but poverty stricken Brahmin from India's highest caste and the other a Dalit or "untouchable" from what has traditionally been the lowest rank in Indian society. We also meet the friendly Muslim and Hindu women at the fitness center Kennedy frequents who are generally more interested in having a chance to relax and socialize than they are in exercising.
Miranda Kennedy met these women and became part of their lives while she lived in Delhi for more than five years. She had dreamed about India, and wanted to go there herself, for most of her life. In her family that journey had become something of a tradition since first her great-aunt Edith traveled there as a missionary and later her hippie parents wandered around the subcontinent. When the September 11 attacks happened Kennedy was a radio reporter in Manhattan and she spent weeks sleeping, eating and working at the studio, which was just a few blocks from the World Trade Center, afraid that if she left the NYC police would not allow her back in. Afterwards, burnt out on hourly news reporting, and wanting to follow the story in a more in-depth way from Afghanistan she managed to get a small grant to train radio reporters in South Asia. It wasn't much money, just enough to get her started and after that she had no guarantee of work.
Everyone advised her to wait, and work her way up to be a foreign correspondent within the system, but like her peripatetic family before her Kennedy felt the need to shake her life up and go somewhere she hoped she could become her fullest, most interesting self.
With Delhi as her home base Kennedy reported on some of the biggest South Asian stories of the time, including the war in Afghanistan, unrest in Pakistan and the 2004 tsunami, but it isn't her adventures as "super reporter girl" that make up the bulk of this volume. It's Kennedy's account of her struggle to find the right balance between work and love, and the way that quest was deeply and surprisingly influenced by the Indian people, especially the women, that she became close to, that is the larger and far more fascinating part of the book.
This is the second book written by a female NPR reporter who spent time living in South Asia that I've read in the last few months, and I also highly recommend Lisa Napoli's book on Nepal, Radio Shangri-La.
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