The Beautiful and the Damned: A Portrait of the New India [Hardcover]

Siddhartha Deb (Author)

Book Description

Release date: August 30, 2011

A Globe and Mail Best Books of the Year 2011 Title

 

Siddhartha Deb grew up in a remote town in the northeastern hills of India and made his way to the United States via a fellowship at Columbia. Six years after leaving home, he returned as an undercover reporter for The Guardian, working at a call center in Delhi in 2004, a time when globalization was fast proceeding and Thomas L. Friedman declared the world flat. Deb’s experience interviewing the call-center staff led him to undertake this book and travel throughout the subcontinent.

The Beautiful and the Damned examines India’s many contradictions through various individual and extraordinary perspectives. With lyrical and commanding prose, Deb introduces the reader to an unforgettable group of Indians, including a Gatsby-like mogul in Delhi whose hobby is producing big-budget gangster films that no one sees; a wiry, dusty farmer named Gopeti whose village is plagued by suicides and was the epicenter of a riot; and a sad-eyed waitress named Esther who has set aside her dual degrees in biochemistry and botany to serve Coca-Cola to arms dealers at an upscale hotel called Shangri La.

Like no other writer, Deb humanizes the post-globalization experience—its advantages, failures, and absurdities. India is a country where you take a nap and someone has stolen your job, where you buy a BMW but still have to idle for cows crossing your path. A personal, narrative work of journalism and cultural analysis in the same vein as Adrian Nicole LeBlanc’s Random Family and V. S. Naipaul’s India series, The Beautiful and the Damned is an important and incisive new work.

 

The Beautiful and the Damned is a Publishers Weekly Best Nonfiction title for 2011.

Editorial Reviews

Review

“Splendid . . . Similar to F. Scott Fitzgerald . . . Deb works largely within the format of the profile, which allows him to closely inspect the dents made by modern India in his characters’ lives. . . There is a nuance to even the direst of Deb’s pessimisms—an acknowledgement that India’s lives are newly precarious precisely because they could swing either the way of opportunity or the way of ruin.” —Samanth Subramanian, The New York Times

“Siddhartha Deb is a marvelous participatory journalist, a keen observer of contemporary India. In The Beautiful and the Damned he dives head-first into the places where change is happening, temporarily inhabiting these evolving, often confusing sub-worlds, talking to those benefiting from (and victimized by) said changes, and explaining in prose both highly personal and sociologically insightful how India’s people and culture are coping . . . Much like fellow participatory journalist George Orwell . . . Deb is a distinctly sympathetic firsthand observer of the contradictions between rich and poor . . . Anyone wanting to understand contemporary India’s glaring contradictions, its juxtapositions of glittering boomtowns with horrific slums, should read Deb’s wonderfully researched and elegantly written account.” —Chuck Leddy, Minneapolis Star Tribune

“[An] incisive new look at life on the subcontinent . . . One of Deb’s most stunning achievements is the way he deconstructs India’s IT industry. With remarkable clarity, he describes a business dominated by Brahmins (India’s ruling caste) in which, contrary to common perception, call center workers struggle to eke out a sustainable living, and where even for those who do succeed there lies at the end of the road little more than an ersatz version of suburbia . . . For those who have never been to India, the book will be an eye-opening read. For those more familiar with the country, it will be essential.” —Nitin Das Rai, The Daily

“This brave book strikes a rare note—as a work of journalism and as an interpretation of India’s maladies. The Beautiful and the Damned digs beneath the self-congratulatory stories India tell itself—all the better to expose the stories it seeks to repress.” —Parul Sehgal, Bookforum

“This is a brilliant and sensitive book that succeeds in shifting our gaze from the dazzling glass and steel towers of the business park to the collateral damage suffered by people caught in the age-old tensions between economic mirage, constricting cultural tradition and overbearing social expectation.” —Stanley Stewart, The Sunday Times

“In his subtle, sometimes startlingly intelligent narrative, Deb is drawn to the idea of pretence, and to pretenders, of which he—writer, confidant, friend, provincial, global traveller—is one himself . . . In these pages, Deb is quickened by his extraordinary feeling for the texture of lower middle-class life, as well as his unerring sensitivity to the way a country yet again transforms itself.” —Amit Chaudhuri, The Guardian

“A compelling read. The author’s experience as a journalist ensures that he hardly wastes a word, his local knowledge gives him depth and empathy, while his status as a novelist seems to protect him from intrusive literary flourishes . . . While computer boffins may be the new Brahmins, many of them are actually the old Brahmins. Such points are generally overlooked by those keen to promote the newness of the new India, and Deb generally offers a shrewder, more humane perspective than most travelogues.” —Roderick Matthews, Literary Review

“Siddhartha Deb has gone under cover to write a hands-on account of India’s vigorous capitalism . . . Deb’s perception is that starkly unequal social, political and economic conditions have developed in India over the past quarter century. As a first-hand report, this is authentic, assured and absolutely engrossing, acutely pinpointing the aspirational tragic-comic ironies of modern India.” —Iain Finlayson, The Times (London)

“Siddhartha Deb is one of the most distinctive writers to have emerged from South Asia in the last two decades.” —PANKAJ MISHRA, author of The Romantics

About the Author

Siddhartha Deb, who teaches creative writing at the New School, is the author of two novels: The Point of Return, which was a 2003 New York Times Notable Book of the Year, and An Outline of the Republic. His reviews and journalism have appeared in The Boston Globe, The Guardian, Harper’s Magazine, The Nation, New Statesman, n+1, and The Times Literary Supplement.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 272 pages
• Publisher: Faber & Faber (August 30, 2011)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0865478627
• ISBN-13: 978-0865478626
• Product Dimensions: 8.5 x 5.9 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 13.4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (13 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #693,489 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

17 of 18 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Thought Provoker October 8, 2011

By Gaucho36

Format:Kindle Edition

This book really got to me. I'm American, but I have traveled to India many times over the past 12 years and have been actually living in Delhi for the past two years.

This book made me realize I don't do a lot of critical thinking about what is right under the surface of my day to day experiences. I assume that India's headlong rush forward is a good thing which everyone is happy to see coming. People happy to leave their dusty villages with no future to come to Delhi and get their mobile phones and scooters. The author does a fabulous job laying out the real underpinnings of this game.

I thought the book was extremely well written and I was carried along without effort. I acknowledge the other reviewer who suggests some wrap up might be in order - but on the other hand maybe the author had the ending consciously in mind. What does this all mean? Is this new India good or bad? If you could change something about it what would it be? Is India moving to a better or worse place? Will this all end well or poorly?

This book is most easily read by people with some awareness of or interest in India.....but in the end it is just a great book. I would love to meet the author if he is ever in Delhi.

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Superb ethnography, the best book on contemporary India I have read in a long time October 19, 2011

By Arun Sundararajan

Format:Hardcover|Amazon Verified Purchase

This is a remarkable book. It takes the reader through five narratives of contemporary India, painting a vivid portrait of a country in transition. I'm really impressed with the clarity with which Deb accomplishes this and would rate this book as far more informative (and written in much better prose) than any other book about the ongoing socioeconomic transformation in India. It's not nostalgic, it doesn't romanticize the country or pay tribute to any specific cities: it focuses on the people (an impressive variety of them), not the places or the practices.

(Perhaps this was not the author's intent, but if you're planning to do business in India, or have been assigned to travel there on work, read the first two essays, they give you a good idea of the rich tapestry of Indian aspirations. While I grew up in India, I have lived in the United states for over 15 years, and although I travel to India every couple of months for work, it is hard to see the range of what this book tells you even if you are a frequent visitor.)

The nod to F. Scott Fitzgerald goes beyond his choice of title: the first narrative draws explicit parallels between Arindam Chaudhari and Gatsby, the nouveau rich outsider with a questionable academic past. But Deb is not simply more readable than Fitzgerald, he also rises to the challenge of describing a far more complex society, and one that is going through fairly radical change. It is hard to peg this book as being of a specific "type". There's a mix of relevant history and astute social observation, and a good range of context. Perhaps it is a very readable ethnography, one that anyone interested in India should read. I couldn't put it down once I started it. Then I read it again.

postscript: I discovered earlier this week while in India that the version being sold there does not contain the first chapter "The Great Gatsby", which has been removed following a civil case filed by Chaudhuri's IIPM. (It was published in the magazine "Caravan" back in February 2011.

12 of 16 people found the following review helpful

3.0 out of 5 stars Great Subject But The Writing Gets In The Way November 27, 2011

By pentangl

Format:Hardcover|Amazon Verified Purchase

The book is about the India that is rapidly changing and the Indians that examplify the changing India. The author has picked great characters that tell the story: call center workers, social activists, tycoons, etc. The themes are hope, aspiration, dislocation, and cynicism. It is a wonderful idea for a book that certainly ought to be of interest to anyone who wants to know about the current state of a vast and complex country (and a dynamic economy)---not as a recitation of statistical facts but as in-depth portraits of people on the ground. However, the writing style is novelistic rather than journalistic. There are many asides and reflection; and these diversions are somewhat repetitive and, after a while, self-evident and even slightly trite. It seems that the author is just a bit too ready to impose his voice rather than artfully letting his subjects tell his own strories, which would have been evocative and engaging even if treated with a light touch. Still a book worth the time; but not a sparkling read because of its pretension to be literature.