Customer Reviews

Sideways on a Scooter: Life and Love in India

5 star:		(22)
4 star:		(9)
3 star:		(10)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(4)

 

 

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.

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.

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.

After reading so many books about women who move to exotic locations I was a little nervous about starting this book. Once I got into the story, I was riveted. Miranda Kennedy is a capable storyteller with an eye for detail. Wisely, she doesn't try to share every part of her Indian experience. She focuses on her two closest Indian girlfriends, her maid and a few others, with just enough detail to give the reader a context. She's a model of the writing style of "show, don't tell."

Miranda herself comes from a long line of strong women adventurers. She opens the book by sharing why she chose to go to India, once she realized she wanted to escape the conventional New York journalism career path. She shares details of her quest for her first apartment, where she learns that some landlords simply won't rent to single women.

We can read sociology texts about marriage and relationships in India, but Miranda shows us first-hand how changing cultures affect individuals. One friend agonizes endlessly over whether to "dress western." Another openly defies convention, saying you have to be willing to be obnoxious to survive. She uses a different word - one that would get this review banned or truncated.

A large part of the book is devoted to the importance of marriage and pregnancy among Indian women. It's easy to read statistics about the life of a woman in India. Miranda brings them to life when she writes about her maid, a formerly high-caste woman who is reduced to working as a house cleaner when her husband dies. Following custom, the husband tossed her out with her two small children; they were considered kinder than most because they let her stay for childbirth. She writes about the agony of women who search for a husband the way many Americans shop for a car or a house. Similarly the husband's family scrutinizes the woman the way I've heard farmers buy a horse. One woman was asked to remove her shoes so the prospective bridegroom could inspect her toes.

Women still contribute dowries, although the custom has been outlawed. Custom requires women to behave modestly when meeting prospective grooms. A wedding seems more like a death than a celebration; in fact, women are not supposed to smile or dance at their weddings.

Miranda describes her own forays into the culture. Her "ladies doctor" - Indian for gynecologist - tries to sell her on the importance of having children. Her friend invites her to be a maid of honor at her wedding, where the clash between Northern and Southern India creates yet another painful conflict. The book's title comes from a small paragraph where Miranda learns she can't straddle a scooter as she rides shotgun. She has to ride sideways. It's what women do.

At times I was exhausted as I read this book. It was hard to read one hardship story after another and I suspect living these experience would be even more challenging. I admired Miranda's fortitude. She seems to stay remarkably healthy and energetic. Just surviving in India would be a full-time challenge for most people, and she was off to report in war zones several months a year. For the book, she chose not to focus on her own inner struggles, if indeed she had any. In my opinion, this decision makes the book stronger, as readers are spared yet another iteration of 20-something angst and instead get an insider's view of a complex culture that's hard to penetrate.

The time frame was a hard to track. I had to dig to find the date Miranda arrived in India - 2002 - and somehow couldn't find the date corresponding to her departure.

However, the book is so packed with detail that it's hard to read at one sitting and it's easy for readers to miss something. It's the kind of book many readers will want to read and then return to go over selected passages. It goes without saying that Sideways on a Scooter is destined to be book club reading, but I can also see portions assigned for classes in sociology and marriage and family.

I first bought this as an e-book after reading a sample on my Kindle. I had recently visited India and have had a long history of interest in her people and culture. I was so drawn into the writer's style of exposing the sociology of the Indian women in the 21st century that I couldn't put the book down. I knew that Sideways on a Scooter was a book that I wanted to have in my personal collection as well. It is a book about sociology, written about real characters, that reads like a good novel, yet it is true! Extremely refreshing to read!

This book was eye-opening for me. I was, like the author, under the impression that India had come a long way in its rigid caste system and the role and treatment of women. If what the author portrays in this book is accurate, the country has a long way to go before the attitudes of the general population change to one of equality among its people and the worth of women as citizens rather than as wives and mothers.

Don't expect this book to be like "Eat, Pray, Love". It isn't. The subtitle of this book, "Life and Love in India" is not reflective of the author's "life and love", but rather the life and loves of the women she meets in India. She wryly offers us a glimpse into their deeply conflicted life and roles. Careers, marriage, motherhood and the tangled caste system are revealed to us in disturbing detail through her interactions with the women she meets during her five years in the country.

India has changed, yet much remains the same. "Untouchables"? Still there. Arranged marriage? Still there. Women as chattel? Still there. Deep prejudice? Still there. Indian law has changed, but the Indian culture remains deeply entrenched in ancient systems, many of which are horrific to the western mind.

If you want to glimpse India from a feminine perspective, choose this book. Be prepared to be conflicted, angered and amused. It's a non-romanticized glimpse into the lives of women within one of the most important, emerging countries in the new global economy.

Having traveled in most parts of India, and having Indian friends in the U.S., I thought I knew what the lives of Indian women entailed. I was wrong. Miranda Kennedy's vibrant, in depth memoir, Sideways on a Scooter, is a compelling read. As the author surrounds herself in this developing country, she discovers it's not as "Western" as she had thought when she moved to Delhi in her 20's, having given up a career in New York. As the author surrounds herself in what she thinks is a "regular" Indian neighborhood, she interacts with several Indian women, including a woman in her late 20s trying, not too successfully, to find a husband, a Hindu cleaning woman attemting to live by high caste standards so that her children are able to become more successful than she, and a friend who's a profesional woman who drinks, smokes and yet keeps a separate apartament from that of her married boyfriend so that her mother won't suspect the relationship. In her interactions with these women and their friends, she finds she is changing her own attitude about herself and what she wants in her own life,ie., marriage and a family. This book brings forth the real India, from the wonderful scent of flowers to the stench of latrines, to the high living wealthy to the multitudes of deformed beggars. This book is wonderful!

Those of us wanderers who dream of a life abroad (or have lived one) will find great joy in National Public Radio (NPR) reporter Miranda Kennedy`s tale of her life in India. Like so many who wish for a fulfilling life and to see the world, Kennedy`s five years as a freelance journalist living in Delhi will ring true and keep readers turning the pages of "Sideways on a Scooter: Life and Love in India."

What Kennedy does so well is not only convey her own story (aspirations and reality on view for all to see), but also share the lives of the Indian women she came to know. The stories of these women--friends, servants, colleagues--highlight not only the challenges these women face in modern day India, but also the eternal tug between modernism and tradition.

Two of the women, about the same age to Kennedy (late 20s), become close friends with the author. One is trying to balance her life as a modern Indian woman with the desire to find love and marriage. Should she pursue an arranged marriage now that her college romance has not worked out? Is she too old? The fact that she lives away from her family makes her a target of gossip and judgment.

In fact, one of the most interesting stories in the book comes when Kennedy describes her own challenge in finding an apartment, something any Western woman wouldn`t even question. Without a husband, no one in Delhi wants to rent to Kennedy, assuming she must be a "bad" person.

The second story centers around an Indian woman who rejects the traditional concept of marriage altogether, and her challenges are many. She can't live with her boyfriend; in fact, she has a hard time just buying cigarettes as a woman. Although she is a modern woman with an outstanding journalism career, when it comes to society, she is an outcast.

Finding balance between work and love is a common theme for women, even in the West. Add in Indian culture, and the trials are many. What Kennedy does so well is take readers directly into her world in Delhi and into the lives of her friends. She shows that the idea of a modern India is not quite as the media portrays it.

Kennedy never condescends and is able to look critically even at her own behavior in light of her circumstances there. She is able to see how she changes from Miranda to "Demanda" when she comes up against cultural frustration. She learns to dress and act the role of the woman she wants to be without losing herself. She examines her own relationships in light of what she sees other women experiencing.

Most of all, she is able to take us into the heart of the social world that few Westerners ever experience and does it all with love and admiration for her chosen second home, India. While this book could very well have been a reporter's tale of her experiences covering South Asia, instead she has opened a new world up for her readers, illuminating what the women of India have to offer the world and each other.

This is a wonderfully written, easy-to-read account of one women's adventure in India, but it is so much more. Don't miss "Sideways on a Scooter"!

Miranda Kennedy's page-turning memoir "Sideways on a Scooter: Life and Love in India" is an in-depth look at her own Western attitudes and the customs, traditions, culture, history and politics of India. Kennedy discovers through her friendship with six Indian women some of them privileged, some very poor that India's modernization is only skin deep.

Kennedy, a NPR reporter who in 2002, abandoned her boyfriend and her fast-track New York City life to move to New Delhi for five years. During that time she also reported on the war on terror from Afghanistan and Pakistan.

She says even if New Delhi is the capital of one of the world's fastest growing economies it remains a magnet for the rural poor. She says it's impossible to know how many millions live in the slums.

She shared her families fascination with India and saw going there as a right of passage. Her great-aunt Edith lived and traveled there as a missionary in the 30s and her parents made their way along the hippie trail in the 70s.

Kennedy says India's progressive and enlightened constitution has had a negligible impact on women's lives. Acceptable behavior is not national law but thousand-year-old social customs. Although the cast system and discriminating against untouchables is against the law slums are strictly segregated from the wealthier areas. At first Kennedy felt the classic revulsion for arranged marriages, the need for a dowry, the emphasis on caste, virginity and the expectation that the new wife live with her husband's family. Ninety percent of Indian partnerships are still arranged. However after a couple of years in India she softened her views. She realized the people of India are not alone in aligning backgrounds, income, race and education when choosing mates. The metaphorical wisdom of a friend's mother also gave her pause. She said a relationship is like heating water. First simmer, then boil. Americans have it backwards - they expect the water to boil first and when the relationship cools they break it off.

As a foreigner, or Feringhee in Hindi slang, eyes followed her everywhere. The word "boyfriend" has ugly connotations as it implies a depraved, decadent life. To secure an an apartment Kennedy had to wear a traditional village dress, a scarf folded modestly across her chest (she called a "boob remover") and pretend to be temporarily separated from her "husband" in New York. To her relief the landlord accepted this without questioning.

Because it's considered unseemly for a proper Indian lady to straddle the seat of a scooter and wrap her arms around a man Kennedy learned to perch behind her boyfriend sitting sideways with her legs dangling into the street.

Kennedy is a courages and remarkable women. Her fascinating stories and are insightful and informative.

Miranda Kennedy spent five years in India, working as a reporter. Of all the quirkiness that is today's India, the most intriguing is the way women find husbands in this otherwise-quite-modern country; despite all the modern aspects of life that India has acquired, most women still find their spouses through arranged marriages. Kennedy has reached a point in her personal life where she longs for the companionship of a long-term relationship and so much of the story looks at relationships, both Kennedy's and those of Kennedy's Indian friends.

This is a beautifully written memoir that manages to look objectively and passionately at a very intriguing spot in the world.

I'd ride sideways on this scooter again any time.