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India Calling: An Intimate Portrait Of A Nation's Remaking (2011)

by Anand Giridharadas(Favorite Author)

3.7 of 5 Votes: 4

ISBN

0805091777 (ISBN13: 9780805091779)

languge

English

genre

Memoir & Autobiography

publisher

Times Books

review 1: As we have been preparing for our trip to India, I have read a series of books, both fiction and non-fiction, focused on life in current-day India. Although each book concentrated on a different facet of modern Indian society/culture, an overriding theme in each was the omnipresent corruption that permeates business,the legal system and government. I believe that this non-fiction memoir offered me the clearest picture of both the importance of family relationships and at the same time, the lessening importance of family relationships as young people in the new middle class are leaving home, sometimes to live abroad. Of all the books I've read in the past few months, Calling India has offered me what seems to be the most useful picture of a complicated country. I think... more it is interesting that the author makes a case for émigrés returning to their native land now that India is modernizing, the caste system is weakening, and economic opportunity is developing...yet he has returned to the US, the country of his birth. Each of the books I have read has been fascinating, but I am left with the impression that regardless of its tremendous progress, its call centers and new manufacturing plants, India still has a long, long way to go.
review 2: I'm not sure what to make of this book. It was definitely written in a way that made it a quick-paced read. Giridharadas narrated a series of stories about various people in different parts of India to give a sense of how the country has changed/is changing. But at the same time I felt that something is lacking. It felt kind of superficial as if meeting one man with particular goals in one village can give one a sense of an entire nation. I like the way his personal narrative enters the story and think it would have been much more interesting had he narrated a book about the phenomenon of Indians raised abroad who are returning to India. There are elements of this in the book, but I think he might have been much better prepared to narrate that kind of book than one on the way India is changing from the perspective of someone who just returned to write about it for a few years. less

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