The Beautiful and the Damned: A Portrait of the New India

by Siddhartha Deb

The Beautiful and the Damned presents an affecting, incisive portrait of the vast, fascinating, and incongruent country that is globalized India.

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 work.

A Publishers Weekly Best Nonfiction Book
A Globe and Mail Best Books of the Year

Genres: India, Nonfiction, Politics, History, Travel, Asia, Indian Literature

272 pages, Paperback

First published August 30, 2011

About the author

Siddhartha Deb is an Indian author who was educated in India and at Columbia University, US. Deb began his career in journalism as a sports journalist in Calcutta in 1994 before moving to Delhi to continue regular journalism.

Reviews

[Neil · Rating 4 out of 5]

For those of us that live outside of India and take trips there, it is easy for us to wax eloquent about how much "fun" India is, or how affectionate people are or how glamorous things can be or how much easier life in India is with the help of servants and drivers and relatively inexpensive labor. What lies just beneath the surface, however, is something we mostly miss out on not living there. And for those of us that live there, we are doing what is necessary to survive in what is essentially a brutal place.

This book is a stark reminder of the constant brutality that lies just beneath the surface but is all pervasive in Indian society. Helplessness for just about anyone is a real fear. Even those who are privileged and seemingly above it all are affected by the brutality. One is either being brutalized, on the brink of being brutalized, conducting brutality upon others, or simply complicit by buying into the system. And for the remaining few who are not complicit, well, they're usually living in self-created bubble of ignorance, borne almost always out of privilege.

[Brian Griffith · Rating 5 out of 5]

To me, this seems like the most down-to-earth, unsensational, helpful sort of journalism. Instead of looking for newsworthy events or personalities, Deb just talks to ordinary working people, patiently getting to know them over days or weeks. His focus is simply to learn the day-to-day realities of their working lives. The informants include call-center staff, village farmers, steel factory workers, management consultants, local self-help organizers, software engineers, and bar girls. Instead of discussing pros and cons of economic, political, or social transformations, Deb just exposes their impact individual lives.

[Sairam Krishnan · Rating 5 out of 5]

Extraordinary.

I have been waiting to read this book without knowing I was. There is a serious, significant dearth fo literature that that is able to throw light at the rot at the heart of the Indian economy and shine a much-needed light on the indignities of working class life in our cities and towns. Deb bridges that gap with easily one of the best books written about the India I grew up in.

Deb's writing takes some getting used to. In the first essay, the larger-than-life Arindam Chaudhuri takes centre-stage, and the writing, and what Deb wants to say, does not find form, not immediately. But in the middle of the book, his sharp eye and sense of scene takes charge. As I read this part of the book, I realised that it had been a while since I read something this compelling. Rana Dasgupta's Capital, and Samanth Subramanian's writing are comparable, but that's it: No one else is writing like this.

Which is also why I really wished the book was longer. This could have been something huge, devastating, something like A Million Mutinies Now. It is not. What it is is an excellent book, well researched, well reported, and superbly written. That it falls short of an imaginary goal I thought up is neither a failure of the writer nor of what he chose to write.

Perhaps we may not be ready for a book like that.

[Rudrangshu Das · Rating 3 out of 5]

As the name suggests in this book the author has tried to capture several facets of life in modern India in its contrasting shades. How on the one hand Indian economy is booming with lots of outsourced jobs and foreign investment pouring in, and on the other hand millions of Indians are still living without the basic amenities, thousands of farmers are committing suicide every year and a lot of Indians are struggling to come to terms with the changing and confused environment. The idea is good, but I am not entirely happy with the execution. The author, Siddhartha Deb, himself an Indian, left India in the early 2000s to study in America, and he wrote this book on his return.

Let me give a brief overview of the chapters. The book consists of 5 chapters -

1. The opening chapter is about Arindam Chaudhari, the self proclaimed management guru and the chairman of IIPM and Planman media. In this chapter Deb tells us how Mr Chaudhari is making a living on the dreams and aspirations of the youth of India, who want to fit in and be a part of the corporate culture. He gives us a close look of Arindam Chaudhari the man, his background and business. And much of it is critical if not derisive. No wonder he got a court injunction on the publication of this chapter, hence in the latest copies of the book being sold in India this chapter has been omitted. But due to the negative publicity the chapter is easily available on the internet on various blogs.
2. This chapter is about the flag bearers of the booming economy, the Indian engineer. I found this chapter kind of confusing I couldn't really make out what point the author was trying to make, except for the fact that there is a great divide between the dreams and achievements of the engineers of today.
3. This chapter is about the plight of the farmers of India. Deb has focused on farmers from the telangana region of Andhra Pradesh who used to grow a crop called Red Sorghum. This chapter again, highlights some issues like - how industrial development has adversely affected Indian farmers, but lacks proper analysis.
4. The 4th chapter is about the huge mass of temporary workers in India. This chapter was much better than its predecessors, the author interviewed some workers from a steel factory in Andhra Pradesh, and gave us an account of their lives and their reasons for doing what they were doing.
5. The final chapter is about a girl from the North Eastern state of Manipur who works in New Delhi. This was the best chapter in the whole book. Although this chapter didn't deal with one single issue, but through the the protagonist's account of her life, the author pointed out the alienation that people from the North East feel from the mainland. The account was personal and very heartfelt, and in a way the protagonist Esther was as much the hero of this book as she was for her state and North East India.

Apart from the 5 chapters the book also carried an introduction where the author spoke of several things, most notable among them was about a man Named Abdul Jabbar who runs an NGO for the women widowed in the Bhopal Gas Tragedy. The book is a nice read, it brought forth a lot of things that I didn't know about my country, although the issues in general lacked in depth analysis, but then I don't think analysis of issues was the point of this book. What I disliked about the book and the author in particular was his mostly sardonic tone throughout the book, the kind of tone one finds (atleast I have experienced first hand) in Indians who have lived in the West for quite a few years and somehow feel themselves to be superior from the rest of us. Also the fact that I am prejudiced against these kind of people, may have led me to being too critical of the author.

All in all I would say The Beautiful And The Damned is a good fast paced read, with less of the beautiful and more of the damned. But the author can hardly be blamed for that, that's how our country is shaping up.

[Vivek Vikram Singh · Rating 2 out of 5]

The book was fairly informative, thought provoking and does address several important issues being faced by the new India; however the grouse I have with the author and the book is the lack of balance. There is too little beauty, and far too much damnation.

Like several Indians who live in the west, and are always eager to please their western masters (audience, editors, employers - take your pick), Deb comes across as far too sanctimonious when talking about India. The self-congratulatory prose, in which he barely restrains himself from out-rightly condemning people for the slightest "flaws" - the engineer who write poems on microchips is essayed as insecure, out of touch and a cartoonish caricature of the Indian IT engineer stereotype; the senior management IT professional is rebuked for being too materialistic, while simultaneously being mocked for being wrongly spiritual. The farmers are painted as miserable wretched creatures, who must be reviled for having children who, like the author, live in America.

No one and nothing in this India seems to be good enough for Deb, and I am sure that the audience this book was primarily intended for, would love to read this book and feel good about how much better they are sitting far away from this India.

All the good that the book had, has largely been negated by the sense that the author is smirking through this entire narration.

[Fiona · Rating 3 out of 5]

Flashes of brilliance and insight about the new India and the impact of its "progress" on various different groups of people, interspersed with long passages which meandered without point or structure. At times I felt like I was skirting round the edges of something interesting without ever actually getting there. When the writing was good it had something very important to tell us about what it means to be human in the 21st century - looking at how India is developing has serious things to tell us too about how we live in the west - and when it was not so good it just missed the mark. The chapter on the experiences of women in modern India managed to miss almost everything I would have thought was important to address about women's lives in India today.

[Talia · Rating 2 out of 5]

I wanted to learn more about contemporary India but this book was disappointing. Deb follows 5 main stories...but each one feels a bit more like a voyeur's view or surface-level take than a deep dive into a subject (with Deb maybe more interested in the process of interviewing and the idea of himself as a writer who has transcended all this than in the people themselves). Perhaps it should have been 5 separate books, but even as it was each chapter seemed a little too long for what it offered. The chapter on price fixing in agriculture (Red Sorghum) was the most interesting. Only the final chapter focused on a woman's story, and that felt stuck-on as a requirement at the end.

[Naveed Qazi · Rating 5 out of 5]

Reading this non fiction book was a surreal experience. It's so novelish. Deb is a crafty writer. It's probably the best non fiction book I have read from any Indian writer until now. It talks about important issues of state migration of labourers, expat life, materialism, mundane middle class lives, political corruption, poverty, racism, farmer issues, globalisation in India, ethnic tensions, industrial developments, scams etc. Deb has tried to compose all these modern themes in one book, and we should appreciate his relentless first hand research. That's why I would encourage others to read Deb because he seems very underrated. Despite this book released years back, these themes are still very relevant in India. That's the biggest strength of this book.

[Roberta · Rating 3 out of 5]

Questa nuova India sembra già vecchia e i personaggi qui presentati non sono particolarmente simpatici. Tutto ruota attorno al denaro, di tutto viene ostentato il prezzo.
Siddhartha Deb ci presenta 5 situazioni: l'indiano ricco (o arricchito); l'ingegnere; il contadino e la campanga; la fabbrica ed i lavoratori precari; sole, per ultime, le donne.
Nonostante un livello di scolarizzazione elevata (molte lauree in materie scientifiche, molti master) le ambizioni sono basse e si concentrano sul mero stipendio piuttosto che sull'astratta idea di carriera. Certo, quando si pensa che spesso alle spalle c'è un'intera famiglia da mantenere la scelta è possibile, ma trovo in parte swconcertante che una donna con master in biologia desideri fare la cameriera, per quanto in un ristorante di lusso, prettamente per via delle mance.
C'è anche molta attualità tra le pagine, pur con questa sensazione di notizie già sentite. L'edizione italiana è del 2012 e parla dell'outsourcing a call center indiani, della bolla delle dotcom, della consuetudine allo stupro di donne non tutelate. La verità è che, escludendo pochi quartieri delle grandi città, l'India non sembra ancora adatta a tutte queste persone che si muovono e si incrociano, interagendo loro malgrado.
Mi aspettavo in effetti un reportage più leggero, forse più patinato, che si concentrasse su storie di successo di persone che si sono affrancate da vecchie tradizioni. Invece gli schemi resistono e per la mia mentalità risultano spiacevoli. Tuttavia bisogna dire che come reportage è ben scritto e le vicende sembrano narrate senza aggiunte o bias da parte dell'autore

[Elaine Tama · Rating 5 out of 5]

Siddartha Deb gives us an excellent, well-written portrait of different sectors of the current, "new" India, through his interviews of people from all walks of society and also his analysis and research of the business world as well as society and governmental impacts on these Indian. He attempts to describe both the glitter of the new high rises, malls, call centers, and the various business schools that produce the tech employees to work in these places. But in tracking down individuals who are striving to make it in this new world, we learn about the extreme difficulties and challenges faced by this young generation who are trying to succeed or at least become secure in the economy. I cannot forget one of the last people he interviews, Esther, who is an optimistic, high achiever, but working in "Food and Beverage" in a luxury hotel, has a shift that begins at noon and ends at 2 a.m. She lives in a small apartment where she supports her sister and brother, and has a long commute to get to work by noon. Of course in India a "commute" means taking several different buses and other forms of public transportation. To me this book must also represent a description of so many other Asian and Middle Eastern countries right now, to a greater or lesser extent. I had an almost surreal experience reading this book, because I am also reading Paul Theroux's book "The Elephanta Suite," a novel about modern-day India. I must say, the two books complement each other.

[Barbara · Rating 4 out of 5]

The Beautiful and the Damned is a collection of five essays by Siddhartha Deb which lifts the lid on aspects of Indian life that are outside the experience and exposure of most outsiders who visit the country. It’s the story of ordinary and extraordinary people living in the world’s biggest Democracy in the new Millennium. People for whom the economic boom is making either an enormous or a negligible difference to their lives – all depending on where they stand on the economic ladder. For an Indiaphile like myself, it’s compulsive reading.

The coverage of topics is impressive and runs the range of success, aspiration, exploitation and disappointment. The book kicks off with Deb’s determination to understand a young, wealthy and successful management guru called Arindham Chaudhuri who runs a training academy that promises much but mostly seems to deliver jobs within its own organisation. On one hand Deb’s looking for the fraud behind Chaudhuri’s claims but on the other, finds himself getting sucked into the dreams of the students and the fantasies of the family providing the means for those students to build their new lives. This first chapter takes the title ‘The Great Gatsby’, perhaps continuing his original F.Scott Fitzgerald theme which runs through the title ‘The Beautiful and the Damned’. I’d love to make some clever comments but I’ve not read enough Fitzgerald to know if he’s pulling off a very clever analogy or just pinching some good titles.

The second chapter addresses the role of engineers in the new India, examining the rise of the high-status engineer, the emigration to the west where they struggle to adapt and the subsequent return of (mostly) young men who couldn’t quite fit in in the USA but can’t live comfortably in their old homelands either. Focussing on the corridor between Hyderabad and Bangalore with its Special Economic Zones, Deb hunts down some fine examples of the modern engineer and his problems. There’s the returnee and his new house in a gated communities of identikit American-style housing estates, insulating him from a world where he no longer fits. There’s a bizarre interview with a nano-poet who proudly claims to have created the art of nanopoetry, writing ‘poems’ in binary on the microchips he designs. Crazy weird stuff.

Chapter three takes us into the countryside and focuses on a scandal regarding the growth of red sorghum, a crop that’s fed to cattle and chickens, not people. The scandal is well documented in the press and other books and revolved round a seed dealer encouraging the local farmers to grow this crop and then being unable to pay the promised price for the crop after other seed traders drove the price down and his bank withdrew his credit. Riots followed, farmers killed themselves, properties were burned to the ground. It’s a fascinating examination of how tough it is to be a small farmer and how easy it is for everything to go badly wrong. Banks let the dealer down, he let down the farmers and all hell broke lose. All over a crop the farmers couldn’t even feed to their families. Deb interviews people affected throughout the supply chain, not only looking at the red sorghum crisis in isolation, but also examining the poisoning of water supplies and the destruction of good land. It’s dangerous stuff and at times readers will wonder if Deb has any sense of self-protection.

Chapter four examines ‘the permanent world of temporary workers’ looking particularly at the hard lives of migrant workers within India, people who’ve travelled a long way from their home states in search of work and money. He meets men destroying their health to work in steel foundries, taking as much money as they can until their bodies give up. He meets an educated middle-class man walking across the countryside going door to door at factories, looking for a chance to scrape a living. The man reminds Deb of the words of the Nobel Prize winning author Amartya Sen who said that famine doesn’t happen through lack of food – it happens because “the powerful take food from the powerless” and asks him to put that in the book (which of course he does). Deb tells us that 77% of the population of India live on less than 20 rupees (about 30p) per day whilst the number of millionaires and billionaires grows year after year. The economic miracle of the Indian economy is not for everyone.

The final chapter is called “The Girl from F&B” and focuses on interviews Deb had with a girl called Esther who works in ‘F&B’ – the trade shorthand for ‘food and beverage’. On the surface Esther is a young successful woman, working in the top hotels and the trendiest restaurants, but the gloss is only superficial. She and her brothers and sisters are crammed into a tiny apartment in a bad area of Delhi, denied the chance to live somewhere better by their ethnic origins (they come from North East near the Chinese border and are taunted by locals as ‘Chinkies’. It’s a hard life – two hours of commuting each way, long hours, good tips, but the money’s soon eaten up by the relatives she supports. Esther looks as if she’s living the dream but for the Beautiful and the Damned, the dream is never far from a nightmare.

I read The Beautiful and the Damned voraciously, touched by the people Deb introduced us to, moved by their plight, or shocked by their deviousness, saddened by the exploitation but seldom with any doubt that the stories were entirely authentic. I would struggle to sit down and read an academic book on any of the topics covered so I’m grateful to Deb for making this an easy – though often uncomfortable – read. I knew many of the areas he visited and finished the book feeling that my next visit to India will be enriched by what I learned by reading The Beautiful and the Damned.

[Sylvia Arthur · Rating 4 out of 5]

An intriguing journey through the India you don't see. Deb goes behind the veneer of life in the New India and lays bare the contradictions that exist between the image and the reality. Told through the lives of five main characters, these well researched and well told stories together make up a narrative that tells you more about 21st century India than anything I've read to date and in such a subtle and darkly comic way. Deftly constructed and thoroughly engaging. Highly recommended.

[Umesh Kesavan · Rating 3 out of 5]

A nuanced portrait of contemporary India -with no sweeping generalizations- told through profiles of five representative Indians. The Indian edition does not have the chapter on Arindham Chaudhury but ironically,this chapter must be the most read one online as it went viral a year or so back. My favorite chapter is the one on Esther, the waitress from North-East India.

[Sheela Lal · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of the best glimpses into the complex systems that govern "modern India" with a sharp focus on the people those systems harm. The content requires a fundamental understanding of India, which is accessible through every other set of non fiction essays in English. Highly highly recommend for taking the analysis to the next leve!!!!

[Rajat Ubhaykar · Rating 2 out of 5]

A hugely incomplete book.

[Begum of Blah · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is a collection of snapshots that capture the lives of different people. All the characters in this book are from different class, caste, gender, region, religion and so on. One identity that they share, is their nationality. However, the nation of India came into existence in 1947 and it’s still not (and probably never will be) possible to essentialize its characteristics. It seems to be a loosely packed identity. Having said that, there is one similarity between all these characters that Deb fleshes out in this book, it's the times they live in. This book is a rumination of the times, just like Fitzgerald, who inspired the name of this book. He is writing about the “Indian Dream” -- what is it to live, love, dream and despair in the New India. Fitzgerald characters were caught in the glamour of the American dream but found themselves lost in their hollowness.
He writes, “A country that has seen a sudden infusion of wealth and a rapid disengagement with its past tends to throw up people who are traveling very quickly and seem to have no clear antecedents.” They jump in the fast-forward queue of the neo liberal market/
modernity and try to secure a future of better (than what it is now) material wealth and social security (and respectability). Like Fitzgerald's characters, the real characters of book chase the “Indian dream” while living ambivalent lives of newer promises and insecurity.
On the surface Deb argues that they are modern, sporting trendy fashion and latest phones but deep inside they are frustrated with the superficial mobility and stressed about heading towards uncertain futures. With the liberalization of markets and withdrawal of government support structures, there is a class of people who enjoy the benefits of the smart cities but there are those who have fallen through the gaping holes of the “Shining India”. They find themselves hit with even more precarious lives due to increasing unpredictable weather on one hand and informalization of markets and greater state surveillance on the other. This generation of Indians often find themselves lost between what they set out to achieve and what they receive.
The book starts with the author telling us about his personal journey from a small town in North eastern hills, Shillong to being one of the many people who migrated to comfort of urban anonymity. In the city, it does not matter where one comes from or how one earns a living as long as they are capable of affording their stay in the city.
He lays out his thesis discussing his brief but memorable undercover stint at BPO’s in 2004. This was a time, when India was a main node of globalization, with several young folks from small and big cities sending sleepless nights on trans-international calls faking accents for the benefit of their foreign clients and spending a part of their salary on newer kinds of entertainments in the form of restaurants, malls and pubs with their coworkers. They are at the same time are confident about themselves, and rigged with insecurities and self-doubt. It is this precise point that anchors all the narratives in this book. What draws Deb into the lives of Indians of this generation is the idea of pretense and the pretenders, of which he – writer, confidant, friend, provincial, global traveler – is one himself.
The precarity of this pretense comes from being in such a rush to be on the gaining side of this wealth distribution. There are some who gain greater mobility but there are so many who can't really make a comfortably spot for themselves but they also cannot go back to their provincial homes where there is very little of what they call “future”.

[Ronit · Rating 4 out of 5]

The book takes as its entry point people from five different places in India and weaves their narrative into five different chapters, each dealing with a specific aspect of India.

The first chapter deals with a businessman owning a management institute in Delhi. Alert to opportunities provided by the new India, the businessman attempted to chart a course through behaviour bordering on unethical, and most probably illegal, methods. Coming from a middle-class family, without access to the exquisite English required by the elites in this country to be truly accepted, he symbolised hope to the students coming to his institute that they can also reach the heights that he has created for himself. Mobility in India is highly limited, and these people are highly resentful of the older elites, who look down upon them with contempt. The second chapter discusses engineers who have returned from the US to settle in India. The author explores their inner life and attempts to showcase the trials and tribulations faced by them in re-adjusting to a land from which they now feel disconnected.

The third chapter brings to the fore the tragedy faced by farmers in Andhra Pradesh (and the rest of India), where free-market policies have led to an epidemic of suicides. The fourth deals with the life of temporary workers who migrate from one corner of the country to another in search of jobs. While the rich and middle classes have benefitted from India’s liberalisation, the same cannot be said about the poor. This was the most painful chapter for me, as the author discusses the brutal conditions under which these workers work in factories. To make matters worse, to save costs factories don’t keep most workers on their rolls and they are sub-contracted away with no responsibility on anyone’s part. They go to factories and work for a few months until their body and spirit is broken, after which they return home and remain there until they run out of money and the vicious cycle restarts. The fifth and last chapter deals with the life of a north-eastern waitress in Delhi.

Some of the themes that were recurrent in the book were firstly, the disproportionate power control over land has given to the rich. Whether it be Hyderabad or Delhi it is land which allowed the ambitious to seize the opportunity. The other is the feeling of alienation that people who migrated felt, whether it is the US returned engineer, the factory hand or the waitress of a restaurant, all who have seized opportunities but now don’t know where they truly belong. The author moves away from stories of ‘India Shining’ to focus on stories at the periphery of our vision, stories we don’t necessarily pay any attention to while they unfold everyday in front of our eyes, and by doing that he manages to shine a light on aspects of India generally ignored.

[Jenny Brown · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book sheds a bright light on the dark side of progress and wealth in India and illumintes the terrible price people are paying for "economic development." Much of what Deb has to show us is deeply disturbing. But it's an important book for that reason and made me far more aware of what is going on in India than I had previously been.

The rabid materialism he describes makes the average American seem like a deeply spiritual person. Ironic, in view of the long-held American image of India as a hotbed of spirituality. But Deb paints the picture of a culture where the lust for wealth and the accumulation of status symbols trumps any other human drive, destroying the lives of those who get caught up in it.

I kept hoping he was wrong. On the other hand, as a student of astrology I have long been struck by the way that Hindu astrology (Jyotish) concentrates entirely on reading the chart to find indicators of how to get rich and succeed in a material fashion while Western astrology concentrates on psychological and spiritual growth. So I find it easy to believe that Hindu culture might predispose people to dedicate their lives to completely materialistic ends.

The perception by those raised in this caste-dominated culture that the poor are poor because of past life karma also appears to have the toxic effect of potentiating oppression and corruption that harms the poor.

I came away from this book appreciating many things in our American culture that get overlooked. Yes, we do have a consumer society, but most of us also, despite everything, share a belief that it is our responsibility to help those less fortunate and that the inner emotional life is as important as the amassing of wealth.

Definitely worth a read by those interested in the cultural forces that are shaping our world.

[Shawn · Rating 4 out of 5]

I liked this book. Have you noticed how many books are entitled the beautiful and the damned? There are quite a few pop up if you try to enter this title in Goodreads.
I think about this global situation a lot, and (I love your name) Siddhartha Deb paints a picture of working in the lucrative F&B or Food and Beverage (being a waitress) supporting your siblings who all have degrees but who can't find appropriate jobs, supporting them on your tips. Or working in the call center or as a software engineer. Those seem to be all the options. Customer Service in Bangalore, F&B, computer software, then straight down jump to scavenging smoldering dumps stepping over corpses. This world we are creating is f*cking bananas.
I'm a communist--not as it has ever been practiced by Chairman Mao and Stalin committing genocide on their own people, but I think every family in America should adopt a family in India. I think I'd give them like 25% of my wages if they'd agree to stop having babies. Try to slow down our 7 billion on earth from becoming the 9 billion saturation point where we'll be machine-gunning each other for a bottle of water.
I assume no one would actually have to practice safe sex, my adopted family would be allowed to just take the money and cheat on the other part of the agreement. I wouldn't allow it to be a female beat-down, though. The woman in the family would be in charge of disbursement of funds and if the men don't treat the women fairly, their ass is kicked out.
I know I'll just have to write my world; there's zero chance of it existing in reality.

[Celeste · Rating 3 out of 5]

"I grew increasingly interested in these apparent opposites – visibility and invisibility, past and present, wealth and poverty, quietism and activism."

Journalists do an important job. In this book, Deb investigates whether India is really all it’s promised to be in the new millennium, where, as a BRIC, there are reports of new wealth, consumerism and a riding middle class. He explores “new India” through 5 vignettes: self-made millionaires; NRIs who come back to India primarily in the US/ the tech sector in Hyderabad; farmer/ peasants and a petty conflict; migrant workers in a steel factory, and women working in the F&B sector. It really isn’t a glamorous job: traveling long-distance by buses, staying in dingy hotels — all to write an expose that we, the global audience, can consume from the comfort of our homes to have a more holistic understanding of India.

Yet this book can be a bit dry, bogged down by details that seem insignificant. The first essay was brilliant; interspersed with Deb’s own commentary on society, but the rest of the book seemed more descriptive than analytical. As I’m reading 2 books simultaneously, each written by a journalist, for this book there is the lack of a flair which puts the reader in the middle of what’s happening. I also don’t love the title of the book, which makes it hard to find online amidst the Fitzgerald copies and didn’t seem evocative of the themes in the book.

Excerpts:

‘When she said, “The boss is asleep,” she was doing something horrible. The people who come to me for help, I am not their boss. When we organize the afflicted, we have to believe that they are our equals. Otherwise, we become like the politicians and civil servants who are supposedly there to serve us, who are elected by us, paid from our taxes, and yet treat us as their inferiors.

‘All the people I went to school with, they became doctors, engineers. I’m the one who became an ordinary garment exporter.’ He waited a beat before delivering his punchline. ‘I earn a hundred times more than them,’ he said, producing a burst of appreciative, alcohol-fuelled laughter from his listeners. To avoid such situations, Varma encouraged each prospective client to make a short trip on The World at a cost of $1,500 a day. ‘That’s the stage,’ he said, ‘when having dinner with other apartment owners, he’ll learn not to flash his wealth. Everyone around him will be super rich, and they’ll consider him crude if he talks about money. Either he’ll learn to shut up, or he’ll get off at the next port and not come back.’

His listeners had come to the session with a rough sense of who they were supposed to be. They received feedback about this from the culture at large, from the proliferating media outlets that obsessed about them as members of ‘India Shining’ (the phrase coined by the BJP government in 2004 to describe the new India), and they were characterized in a similar manner by the West. They knew that as middle-class, well-to-do Indians, they were supposed to be modern and managerial. They were characterized as a people devoted to efficiency, given to the making of money and the enjoyment of consumer goods while retaining a touch of traditional spice, which meant that they did things like use the Internet to arrange marriages along caste and class lines. Still, they needed reaffirmation of the role they were playing, and this is what Arindam provided, distilling down for them that cocktail of spurious tradition and manufactured modernity, and adding his signature flavour to the combination. […] Arindam gave youth from these backgrounds a chance to tap away at IBM laptops, wear shiny suits and polished shoes, and go on foreign trips to Geneva or New York. All this involved a considerable degree of play-acting, and the students spent the most impressionable years of their lives in what was in essence a toy management school – mini golf course, mini gym, mini library – but play-acting was what most of the Indian middle and upper classes were doing anyway, wandering about the malls checking out Tommy Hilfiger and Louis Vuitton.

The corporate individuals among the questioners were heavily outnumbered by management students and faculty members, each of whom turned to the audience to announce the institute with which he or she was affiliated before asking the question. Here were the aspirers again, rubbing shoulders with wealth and power, their hopes visible in the style of asking the questions, which involved blurting out the question and turning away from Mallya before quite finishing, looking sideways at a companion with a smile of triumph, and then sitting down and disappearing from the scene as if they had never even been born to trouble the world with their dreams. […] It was the same phenomenon at work, of young men and women raised to believe that somewhere up there in the hallowed corporate corridors existed all the wisdom and fruits of modern life.

His fortune, ultimately, was built on the aspiration and ressentiment of the Indian middle class. Without the aspirers looking up, emulating, admiring and parting with their cash, moguls like Arindam would not exist. He had made a business out of their aspirations, calibrating the brashness and insecurity that had come to them on the wings of the market economy. […] It is one of the triumphs of our age that aspirers can be made to feel both empowered and excluded, and that all over the world, one sees a new lumpenbourgeoisie quick to express a sense of victimization, voicing their anger about being excluded from the elite while being callously indifferent to the truly impoverished.

When complete, I found out later, Hotel Shangri-La would include 469 rooms, 276 service apartments, and ‘a separate spa village complex designed as a sanctuary within the hotel’, which meant that a fake village would replace the real village that had existed here. As we left the hotel behind and Chak pointed out a row of five towers that would be apartment buildings, I began to wonder why so much of the SEZ was taken up by housing and hotels rather than factories, and why the government was giving tax breaks for what was essentially private property for the affluent classes.

[Aakanksha · Rating 2 out of 5]

Well, I feel that the book has become outdated considering the changes that India has seen in the past one decade. It was primarily written form the mindset of an NRI though, I won't disagree that the author tried hard to avoid that. At times, the storyline was dragged a little too much and it could have been shorter, depth was missing. It seemed like all the stories have a face but not the soul. More was written on how the author took the interview instead on the subject matter which was disappointing. Also, the perception of certain situations by the author such as when an IT guy was not sure of giving him rights to write about him, I found that much shallow. I guess that lack of connection with the author was a major turn off!
It was an okay read but I did not find anything too interesting to continue reading the book but read it just for the sake of finishing it.

[Priyanka Kanse · Rating 2 out of 5]

There were a few reasons that I wanted to read this book. One, because the title is homage to one of my favourite books, and secondly - and probably the main reason - last time I was in India, there was a lot of fuss about the book as it had to be reprinted without a chapter. So maybe my expectations were unnaturally high, leading me to be disappointed.

Disappointed because the stories aren't crafted in a way that pulls you in. For example, Naipaul's writing on India is rich and evocative, an emotional rollercoaster.

That said, the subject matter is interesting, and is a peek behind the veneer of economic development. The corruption that is so obvious to those who have ever spent time in India is given a name and a face, and is quite chilling to see documented.

[Sunaina · Rating 2 out of 5]

What was the point of this book?

[Ritwik Deshpande · Rating 5 out of 5]

Tells it like it is.

[Kathleen · Rating 3 out of 5]

"Then, in 2002, the BJP government in the western state of Gujarat, headed by the business-friendly chief minister Narendra Modi, unleashed a pogrom on Muslims that left 2,000 people dead, thousands of women sexually assaulted, and thousands of others displaced" (9).

"I was there to write a piece on the twentieth anniversary of the disaster that happened on the night of 2 December 1984, when a pesticide factory run by the American multinational Union Carbide spewed out toxic fumes and killed at least 3,000 people in twenty-four hours In the two decades since then, the death toll had reached at least 20,000, while another 100,000 people were estimated by Amnesty International to be suffering 'chronic and debilitating' illnesses caused by the lethal methyl isocyanate (MIC) gas that had leaked out from the factory" (12).

"The Gita emerged as a foundational religious text only in modern times, when Hindu revivalists reeling from colonialism sought something more definitive than the amorphous set of practices and ideas that had characterized Vedic religion until then. It received a new life again in the early nineties when the Indian elites simultaneously embraced free-market economics and a hardened Hindu chauvinism. THey discovered in the Gita an old, civilizational argument for maintaining the contemporary hierarchies of caste, wealth and power, while in the story of Arjuna throwing aside his moral dilemmas and entering wholeheartedly into the slaughter of the battlefield, they read an endorsement of a militant, aggressive Hinduism that did not shirk from violence, especially against minorities and the poor" (53).

"It is one of the triumphs of our age that aspirers can be made to feel both empowered and excluded, and that all over the world, one sees a new lumpenbourgeoisie quick to express a sense of victimization, voicing their anger about being excluded from the elite while being callously indifferent to the truly impoverished" (67).

"A society does not usually change direction with a sudden jolt. It alters course in incremental amounts, running small, secret simulations of experiments that achieve their full-scale elaboration only much later. Its project of transformation contains repeats and echoes, and it is always possible to trace earlier versions of an organization, a phenomenon, or even a person" (72).

"While the local people of Mahabubnagar go elsewhere for work, the factories in the area attract tens of thousands of men from other parts of India. It is an arrangement that suits employers everywhere well, ensuring that the workers will be too insecure and uprooted to ever mount organized protests, against their conditions and ages. They are from distant regions, of no interest to local politicians seeking votes, and they are alienated from the local people by differences in language and culture" (170).

"'Sir, have you read Amartya Sen?' he said, referring to the Harvard economist and Nobel laureate best known for his work on hunger and inequality. 'You remember what he said about famine, that it doesn't necessarily happen because there isn't enough food, but because the powerful take food away from the powerless? It's still like that in India. Are you going to write that in your book?" (182).

[Namit H · Rating 5 out of 5]

Siddhartha Deb's book is a journal of the lives of people in India of the early 2000s. The rapid changes brought up by the opening of the country's economy and its impact on the lives of the people. The book takes an in-depth view of four such stories, starting from the IT boom in Bangalore and the subsequent divisions that it caused in the society, and ending with the experiences of young women from the north-east of India trying to find upward mobility in the bylanes of Delhi while fighting discrimination, hopelessness, and general apathy of the rich. These are not simple, linear accounts but more nuanced and layered stories. As you go deeper, you find a new perspective of the many things that shape the human experience under certain circumstances. The book invariably explores the intricate relationship between the individual and society and is a beautiful archive of the human stories from modern India. I loved the observational writing and enjoyed every bit of it thoroughly. No complaints.

[Krayfish1 · Rating 3 out of 5]

The author spent a couple weeks to a couple months each interviewing 1. A man getting rich off a management school, 2. Engineers who went to the US and came back & want US suburbs in India & who attempted to make computers for poor people. 3. A number of people involved in a farming crisis where a seed dealer promised to buy red sorghum at a certain price and did not come through because other seed dealers undercut the market & blacklisted him to the banks & this resulted in protests, his house burning down, etc. 4. Migrant factory workers in a steel factory - mostly the security guards were willing to chat. 5. A woman who wanted to be a doctor working 14 hrs a day at a high end restaurant in Delhi supporting 2 siblings.

The hunt for interviews is as much a part of the book as the interviews themselves.
Fairly interesting subject.

[jerry · Rating 4 out of 5]

I really enjoyed this book. But WHERE ARE THE WOMEN???!!! This deficit was noticeable. Wives of male characters are mentioned but only briefly and without much detail. Finally at the end there is a chapter about women in modern India, though it felt like an afterthought. This seems like a major oversight and also isn't very surprising.

Besides this I felt like I could move through this text at an easy pace and not got stuck in jargon. I learned so much (as someone who knows very little about the geography and culture of this large country) and it was only revealed to me how much more there is for me to learn. I found this book after reading a wonderful article about Kashmir by Siddhartha Deb and hearing him on Democracy Now!

[Anushka · Rating 4 out of 5]

Having previously read Deb's fascinating report in The Caravan about Arindam Choudhury, I expected the five essays (well, four because the first one is the one on IIPM) to peel back the shiny new layers of India to bring us stories from forgotten, gritty, yet the very real parts of the country. Deb delivered magnificently on all four counts. His intensive research as well as journalistic instincts are brilliant and his somewhat dry wit keeps surfacing every now and then. All five essays show us that behind the shiny exterior of our society lie so many ugly and brutal truths.

[Laura · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a phenomenally we'll-written, fascinating look at today's India. I read the second edition which has added back in a chapter which had been removed from the first edition after a lawsuit. Get the second edition.

Each chapter describes one person who typifies a Indian of that station in life. From a waitress in New Delhi to depressed farmers to a "Trump"- equivalent, this book describes India today brilliantly. I read this just before my first trip to India last year. I saw India through different eyes because of it.