An American-born son of Indian parents describes his stay in India, observing the dilemmas and contradictions of the country and recounting the stories of individuals from industrialists and religious seekers to entrepreneurs and everyday families.
Read More
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," he added, as if seeking to alert him to a ticketing error, "you're going this way?"Giridharadas was returning to the land of his ancestors, amid an unlikely economic boom. But he was interested less in its gold rush than in its cultural upheaval, as a new generation has sought to reconcile old traditions and customs with new ambitions and dreams.In India Calling, Giridharadas brings to life the people and the dilemmas of India today, through the prism of his emigre family history and his childhood memories of India. Traveling through villages and small towns and big cities, he introduces us to entrepreneurs, radicals, industrialists, and religious seekers, but, most of all, to Indian families.As he finds his way in a country at once familiar and surprising, Giridharadas writes in vivid detail of India's own reinventions: how parents and children, husbands and wives, cousins and siblings are seizing hold of their destinies, bending the meaning of Indianness, and enduring the pangs of the old birthing the new.Through their stories, and his own, he paints an intimate portrait of a country becoming modern while striving to remain itself.
Read Less