Butter chicken in Ludhiana: Travels in small town India

by Pankaj Mishra

Based on the author's recent travel experiences in some small towns in India.

Genres: Travel, India, Nonfiction, Travelogue, Memoir, Humor, Indian Literature

276 pages, Paperback

First published December 31, 1995

About the author

Pankaj Mishra (पंकज मिश्रा) is a noted Indian essayist and novelist.

In 1992, Mishra moved to Mashobra, a Himalayan village, where he began to contribute literary essays and reviews to The Indian Review of Books, The India Magazine, and the newspaper The Pioneer. His first book, Butter Chicken in Ludhiana: Travels in Small Town India (1995), was a travelogue that described the social and cultural changes in India in the context of globalization. His novel The Romantics (2000), an ironic tale of people longing for fulfillment in cultures other than their own, was published in 11 European languages and won the Los Angeles Times Art Seidenbaum award for first fiction. His book An End to Suffering: The Buddha in the World (2004) mixes memoir, history, and philosophy while attempting to explore the Buddha's relevance to contemporary times. Temptations of the West: How to be Modern in India, Pakistan and Beyond (2006), describes Mishra's travels through Kashmir, Bollywood, Afghanistan, Tibet, Nepal, and other parts of South and Central Asia.

Reviews

[S.Ach · Rating 2 out of 5]

Many authors have written about their experiences and recounted their weird encounters while travelling through the potholed-road and narrow lanes of India. To some, India provides a culture shock. To some others, it provides a kaleidoscopic enriching view of life. Some find traces of India's spiritual heritage in people's lifestyle. Others discover in them sheer hypocrisy and yearning for modern luxuries despite adhering to the medieval mindset. Some of Mark Tully, VS Naipul, William Dalrymple's books would be best-in-class in this category. Most of these travelogues are bit satirical, or at least those seem so as it's for us like checking your caricatured-self in the mirror and laughing at it.

But never have I read something so demeaning to everything that is associated with our multi-lingual, multi-cultural multi-faceted country. Being critical is one thing, but being condescendingly disdainful is just asking from the reader nothing other than disgust. Of course, the face of 'the wounded civilization' after 'a million mutinies' is mutilated and ugly. But does it deserve so much scorn and scoff? What is completely missing from this narrative is empathy. This book reads more like a incessant rant of 20-something arrogant fellow who places himself above everyone else on the virtue of having read some more books and possessing the ability to throw in western philosophers and thinkers' names every now and then. Clearly, Pankaj Mishra's 20-something self had that holier-than-thou attitude that begot so much contempt for his compatriots.

I would have written Pankaj Mishra off, had I not read his later books 'The Romantics' and 'Temptations of the West'. Though these two books are not masterpieces in themselves, but have definite signs of a good critical mind and deep observation qualities.

I am glad that the realization creeps in and Mishra admits it in the afterward he wrote after 10 years of 'success' of the book. ('success' is definitely not the measure of literary quality of a book, right?)

"But I always felt slightly embarrassed by the book. For, as I continued to write, I began to find my own voice, and to see the need for intellectual and existential self-reckoning in much of what I wrote. Butter Chicken reminded me too much of my younger, callow, unresolved self which had assumed position of intellectual and moral authority without quite earning the always provisional right to them."

I sincerely hope this is Mishra's worst book, as I am keen to read his other books.

[Manu · Rating 4 out of 5]

If one were to go by the title, Pankaj Mishra is hardly the person who can be trusted to write about the "national bird of khalistan", after all he's a complete vegetarian, but then this book is about 'travels in small town India'. From Kanyakumari and Kottayam to Ambala and Murshidabad and Gaya to Mandi and Udaipur and many many more small towns across the length and breadth of India, this is quite a wonderful account of a transforming India..and Indians.
While there is an unmistakable cynicism that runs through many accounts, it does not really take away much from the conversations with a wide array of people - their fears, their hopes and aspirations, and how they cope with the changes around them. Television viewing habits, consumerism, big dreams, all figure as a framework for the author to show the 'progress' that Indians seem to be making as far as lifestyles go. 'Progress', because the author doesn't seem to be entirely pleased with these changes, and the effects on existing ways of life, but since we also see them through the eyes of the people the author meets, the book manages to retain some objectivity.
While some would say there is an aimlessness to the travels, I'd say that despite the differences in locales and attitudes, there is a common thread that runs through the book - of humans, their reactions to change, and how in many ways, a lot of things remain unchanged, despite what the superficial would indicate.
The book worked for me in many ways - I could find glimpses of 'The Romantics' (a work of fiction from the same author, which happens to be a favourite) as his travels take him to Banaras. It also brought about some nostalgia, as it is set in the early 90s, and the changes that the author talks about are something that anyone in the their teens (or even older) during that time, can identify with. These, and the wry humour - especially the part where he's mistaken for a potential groom by Mr.Sharma in Ambala - that surfaces occasionally, took it many notches above a general travel book..

[Preeti · Rating 1 out of 5]

I picked up Pankaj Mishra's 'Butter Chicken in Ludhiana' again which I had earlier tossed aside after reading just 10 pages. Read 5 more pages and disgusted to see how author hates every single thing about India. Paid by a publisher to write a travel book when he was in his early 20s, he is supposedly writing about his travels through small town India but all he is doing is pissing on anything and everything Indian and seems to be in awe of anything/everything foreign! What a waste...I want my money back!!

[Murtaza · Rating 5 out of 5]

Among the writers who have influenced the most in my life Pankaj Mishra has pride of place. Sometimes when one really admires a writer based on their more recent work, they hesitate to plow too deeply into their past: the time before they became what one admires today. I suppose this is why I waited so long to read Butter Chicken in Ludhiana, a book that Mishra wrote when he was a mere 25 years old. Having read it now I was positively surprised. Not only is it good, it is one of his best works and one of the best pieces of travel writing I have ever read in general.

The book takes Mishra on a seemingly unremarkable journey across some anonymous small towns across India. The real story is the subtext: this was a world on the cusp of change amid the liberalisation of the Indian economy. A whole new class of people was preparing to enter history, with their own painful ambitions, resentments, grievances and longings. This class of people is now impacting the politics of not just India but much of the developing world. There were some familiar archetypes in this work, a latently murderous underclass as well as some brilliant and noble people who never had the chance to live their full potential. The good and bad of an emerging world.

I found that this work prefigured much of Mishra’s later writings. It is about Asians and others who were left out of history and are now entering it, for better and worse. I highly recommend it not just to fans of his or people interested in India, but for anyone who enjoys good writing. It’s in the tradition of Naipaul, in a good way.

[Mahak Swami · Rating 4 out of 5]

Could easily be the only unpretentious Indian writer I've ever read.
I strongly recommend this book to everyone from my generation.

[Gorab · Rating 4 out of 5]

Tongue in cheek humor.... a funny take on Indian travel.

This is not a travelogue!
The book is studded with the author's conversation with random people.

There is no description of the places visited. For instance, Udaipur visit is just a few paragraphs and a conevrsation with a boy at a tea stall, who ran away from home.
Or Bangalore visit is about the reaction of people in a movie hall running Indecent Proposal.

What makes it funny is the way the author hates everything! At times, the descriptions are pretty gross - like dried vomit stains on curtains of a private bus, or flies buzzing over turd.
There are loooong sentences, running over more than a paragraph each - very often.

What disturbed me most was the part about Varanasi. Felt gross reading about the level and frequency of sexual harassment - esp in case of non Indian women! I hope the situation would have improved over the years.

Overall: An enjoyable read, probing more of people's mind, instead of places!

[Anurag · Rating 3 out of 5]

Mishra's first book is filled with sardonic humor and is mordantly critical of India of the time but it is also filled with a subtle humor - not all of which was probably intended. Reading his first book after having seen him evolved into a rather academically savvy writer gives you a hint of his own struggles in the changing India. He certainly has some anger and a lot of scoffery to offer to the neo-rich money-grabbing classes of India but he is also found admitting, rather inadvertently, a sort of hypocrisy in his own unwarranted love for the West. This adds that subtle humor to the book - a kind that he is somewhat embarrassed about in the afterword (written in 2006).

The book is deeply informative, beautifully written and makes a great travelogue of the small town India of the 80s. Deconstructing the perceived Indian obsession with sex, Mishra goes on to record the way small town India had reacted to the new temptations of globalization- often changing itself for the worse. Having lived a rather content life surrounded by books in the pre-globalization India, Mishra witnesses a fundamental change at the hour of globalization. Any of those who had lived in that time know of that simple, content and quiet life which existed before globalization - a life which Mishra laments for and writes beautifully about.

However, he also possesses a persistent scorn for the bad English spoken by everyday Indians. His Dickensian accounts of small town poverty are touching but they also exhibit a an Anglophilic elitism of the past generations. His worry for lower economic classes is thus often rendered hollow by such contempt.

Instead of taking a side however, Mishra sets himself to explore this conflict. On one hand he feels a deep sense of ignorance in the wider world due to his small town upbringing but on the other he finds his small-town values at war with the commercial expansionism of the more civilized world. His romance with the left makes him see all symbols of prosperity as encroaching into the simple life of India's ancient order. He finds modern temples hideous and takes pleasure in the quiet of the colonial architecture and vast spaces of nature. Yet somehow the elitist distance from India that he maintains throughout the book has only helped him in commenting on the changes he witnessed. The conflict has indeed been an essential component of the Indian experience - his writing often focusing on the worst of both worlds and making the book a great case-study for countries whose ancient social orders hadn't been ready for the libertarian ideas of globalization.

Mishra goes on to conclude that through a colonial experience, the contempt for one's own people has been institutionalized in India. Education or "westernization" in general, seems a way to overcome one's circumstances often by realizing this contempt for one's own kind. Mishra is seen embracing this depressing view of the world - a sort of withdrawal caused by fall of socialist ideals and a descent into overpopulated poverty, into mindless aggression, revengeful politics and one's own helplessness to all of it. This is indeed a depressing and unsettling view of modern India - the reason why some find his book unfairly critical. But it is through realizing and overcoming such problems that Mishra has become a better writer - and probably deserves to be forgiven for the few immaturities in his early 20s.

[Sandeep · Rating 2 out of 5]

Butter Chicken in Ludhiana.
Travels in small town India
Pankaj Mishra
Rating 2.5/5

The title of the book along with "Travels In Small Town India" should aptly include "by a narrow minded debutant writer". Pankaj Mishra travels across few Indian small towns, meets random people and starts to opinionate on them in his notebook. This book can be considered as an amalgamation of his opinions.

The book came out sometime in 1995. Economic liberalization had happened, Vikram Seth had become rich and a sensation post " A Suitable Boy" and VS Naipaul was still around.

[My assumption and intuition says] Equipped with a desire to become rich and acquire fame just like Seth, by writing, Mishra jumps into the bandwagon with his travel book. Mishra then looks for a USP for the book to sell. Many a people have written travel books, in order to distinguish and sell, Mishra here brings in his Naipaul inspiration into play.

His travel book has very little about places or monuments of importance but about random people and their mindset pre and post economic liberalization. Coupled with stench and squalor Mishra gets a unique USP, a travel book where emphasis has been laid on his observations instead of monuments or history.

Sadly, Mishra falls short in his observations which lack depth and his opinions look rather silly. He does quote many a author in the book, not sure how much he had read them back then.

Reading the book makes you submit to his opinions lest you cast away by discontinuing the book. Overall a very disappointing read. My sincere request and suggestion is to not start this book in the first place.

Cheers.

[Osama Siddique · Rating 5 out of 5]

In 1995 a twenty-five year old Pankaj Mishra got commissioned to write a book about the small towns of India. He set off, unsure of what to write about and how to write it, and produced a book that has steadily grown in stature as the years passed. Not just for its simple, elegant narrative but also for its remarkable prescience. Looking at the complex impact of economic liberalization on Indians he came across (amidst the rampant squalor and bad governance), a burgeoning, ambitious and often angry middle class. What struck me most was not just the untouched realism of his narrative - no wonder because he was self-admittedly often overhearing conversations and taking copious notes in his journal, as indeed also documenting closely all his dialogues and observations - but the utterly undramatized and underplayed but very palpable empathy. He has described his own earlier work as carrying an unrelatable sardonic tone. And yes he is frequently satirical and can also mock the more crass aspects of what he sees, as indeed also the more petty people he comes across. However, he adroitly manages to occupy that vital and 'good' space where one is genuinely hilarious without being cruel or sounding superior.

Mishra often demonstrates that if he chooses to he can have an eye for the picturesque. He describes well and the narrative carry various lyrical descriptions of places and moments without getting overboard. But this is not a book that sets out to romanticize or exoticize. It photographs places and situations as they are, in all their ugliness and sordidness, without any filters. Further, the author's touch is light and though the authorial voice always present it is neither pontificating nor pedantic. This is one book that successfully demonstrated to me what 'showing and not telling' meant.

From the cloud-filled valleys of the north, to the vast arid landscapes of Rajasthan, to impossibly crowded and run-down towns in UP and Bihar, to the water-filled green-scapes of Bengal to the very different dry as well as verdurous landscapes of Maharashtra and Tamil Nadu, and more, Mishra visits a variety of places that does justice to India's bewildering diversity. On trains (great and abysmal), buses, planes, cars, boats and on foot he manages to traverse vast distances (without boring the reader with unnecessary details), staying in squalid hotels and heritage mansions, and meeting an assortment of ordinary people made extraordinary by the light he casts on them and the human connections he builds. Yet never does the narrative drag or falter. He has an uncanny ability to capture and make interesting someone in a few sentences - like a poignant sketch in a few deft strokes - and get the reader hooked. As there are no stodgy descriptions there is also an absence of meandering self-indulgent reflections. Thus he strikes a great combination of always continuing with the journey and making crisp and intelligent observations on it. Not just a compendium of great cultural and sociological insights into India of the mid 1990s this is great travel writing as well.

I had the opportunity to get a sense of small town India over a time span starting a decade after this travelogue was written and lasting over the next decade or so during annual pilgrimages to the country. I also had the tremendous benefit and pleasure of the company of sensitive and knowledgable friends who exposed me to a vibrant, fascinating, changing and also at times disturbing India. I believe that these two factors greatly helped me to truly appreciate Mishra's keen observations and insights, his pathos, and his ready wit. Having lived through a somewhat parallel and fairly similar phenomenon - though distinct also in important ways - of the expansion of small towns, peri-urban settlements, and rapidly growing and increasingly congested urban centers in Pakistan, also deepens the reading experience. As a result, 'Butter Chicken's' astute cultural and social observations ring very true whether they are an explanation of what Mishra witnessed or why people behaved in a particular manner or in the accurate descriptions of how Indian urban life was changing in the 1990s and to what end as well as at what cost.

It is also tremendously instructive to read this book at this moment in time - and one big motivation why I did - as one can easily see in 'Butter Chicken' the germs of that popular and increasingly widespread aggression, small-mindedness, parochialism, ambition, insecurity, over-competitiveness, bigotry, and above all 'anger' that manifested itself in so much that was to follow. Most notably, the events leading to the demolition of the Babri Mosque, the riots and massacres thereafter, and the bloating and ascendance of Hindutva politics in various parts of India. A toxic and hate-mongering politics that is currently besieging and tormenting its secular, pluralistic and multi-communal ethos. Influenced it may have been, as the author says, by Thorstein Veblen's 'The Theory of the Leisure Class' Mishra's 'Butter Chicken in Ludhiana' contains the earliest, still faint but getting more and more vivid, outline of his eventual opus 'Age of Anger: A History of the Present.' As a reader it is quite rewarding to see a precocious mind working out what is unfolding before him; observing; recording; untangling; obsessing over; and then beginning to construct what becomes in the coming years an increasingly persuasive theorization of a massive social, political and cultural phenomenon.

This is a delightful book in many ways, with some charming writing and wit. It is also a depressing book as it deals without exception in brutal honesty. And it is also both a very moving book - most poignantly when Mishra comes across someone young in the boondocks blankly staring at the impossibility of any improvement or growth in his prospects, and it often does. And also a wise one as it endeavors to explicate why that would be his fate - though a man-made one.

[Anders · Rating 2 out of 5]

Imagine Temptations of the West except devoid of any sort of deeper observations. In this disappointing first novel, Mishra travels around small-town India making sardonic observations behind the backs of everyone he meets. I thought it was a boon to find this out-of-print novel for $2 in a tiny used book-store in Dhaka but now I don't consider myself so lucky. It's just so easy to pass judgments on the stagnant upper classes and humorously backwards lower classes in India, a book like this makes you realize that it's too easy. Still, Mishra had to start somewhere. There's always Temptations of the West.

[Dayanand Prabhu · Rating 1 out of 5]

This is not a travel book, This is a book where Mishraji goes to various places and expresses disgust at the local people and passes condescending judgment. In the entire book never even for once has the author expressed any curiosity for the places he is visiting, instead the attitude is as if he is punished. He either eavesdrops on people or befriends only to shamelessly bad mouth them.

[Nikhil · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book is an exploration of a rising middle class in 1990s India by a young man insecure in his intellectual and cultural beliefs. The people he meets, nearly all fascists who yearn to prove they are no longer poor or `backwards' by brutalizing more marginalized populations, are reprehensible. Reviewers who fault him for condemning them should examine why they find these figures sympathetic. Mishra's condemnatory portrait of these people is only more prescient today, where the self-same individuals have delivered a pseudo-religious fascist party to power that condones mob violence against SC, ST, and Muslim populations. In the afterword, Mishra links his work to Veblen's Theory of the Leisure Class and comments that the new petit bourgeoise/middle-classes created by the Second Industrial Revolution were similarly fascistic in tendency (I agree). I am curious as to why this rising class repeatedly turns to authoritarianism and fascism in their political views. It is more than simply an aversion to economic redistribution --- the 15 year old Jain youth (with no idea of Jainism) who is materially secure in life and faces no economic competition from Muslims nonetheless wishes their extermination --- as desiring less redistributive taxes does not require an embrace of genocide.

The book is irritating when the narrator acts to prove his intellectual superiority to the people around him (to be fair, Mishra acknowledges this in the afterword). For example, the narrator's repeated disbelief that people would ask him if Iris Murdoch was married to Rupert Murdoch. Yes, this is an ignorant question; no this does not convey a lack of culture on the part of the questioner. Instead, Mishra should have interrogated how the individuals asking the question were incapable of imagining women as something other than their roles in relation to men. Similarly, his condemnation of romance novels, pulp novels, and Bollywood movies/songs grow wearisome. He fails to understand how even within popular genres it is possible to create subversive and challenging narratives. Indeed, this is artistically more challenging than creating the Platonic ideal of a Marxist novel that no one reads.

Finally, his discussion of sexual harassment in Benares is bizarre and incorrect. His amazement that women face sexual violence in South Asia reflects a deliberate act of ignorance by men to avoid confronting structures of power they are complicit in. Equally bizarre is his decision to center white European/American women at the center of his discussion of this violence, women who articulate several incorrect myths about sexual violence. For example, their idea that they, as white blonde women, face worse sexual violence in South Asia than South Asian women. We know this is false; survey evidence confirms that well-over 75% of married Indian women aged 15--49 have been raped at least once in their lifetime. As is true of sexual violence everywhere, this violence is most-often within household, either by intimate partners or by other male family members. While specific Indian women these women know (i.e., wealthy, educated ones, who only go in public with a male escort) may face less harassment than them, this is certainly not true of the Indian women who are household help or landless agricultural workers. He then engages in a discussion of sexual violence by strangers in the US vs India. Again, the vast majority of sexual violence in both countries occurs within household or by perpetrators that are known by survivors. The fixation societies have with sexual violence as performed by strangers, or members outside the community, frequently ``Others", obscures what sexual violence actually is and allows the society to absolve itself of its own responsibility and complicity in this phenomenon. Mishra's discussion provides no insight into sexual violence in India; he either needed to do more research or remove this from the text.

[Brinda Narayan · Rating 3 out of 5]

Sometimes, as readers, who return to books that we’ve read in the past, we encounter not just the content again, but our past selves. We wonder sometimes, at how we had missed certain allusions earlier, or of why we were so drawn in to something that now seems less compelling. Writers too go through similar feelings when revisiting a past work. In his Afterword to Butter Chicken in Ludhiana, Pankaj Mishra says: “Butter Chicken reminded me too much of my younger, callow, unresolved self, which had assumed positions of intellectual and moral authority without quite earning the always provisional right to them.” One wonders if an older Mishra might have been more empathetic towards the array of colorful characters he encountered in small towns. Travelling into Indian hinterlands in the early 1990s, a witty but biting Mishra documented the changes unleashed into places that he felt, were largely defined by a Main Bhi (or Me Too) syndrome. There are clear indicators that much has changed since then: for instance, in this book, cassette tapes were still the purveyors of music, men still huddled in furtive theatres to watch blue films, and mobile phones were nowhere as ubiquitous as they are today. And yet some of Mishra’s observations about the yawning gaps between aspirations and realities, about the new aggressiveness and individualism, about the all the other attendant costs of rapid development could well be describing the small towns of today. As the French would say, plus ca change, plus c’est le meme chose.

[Vineeth Kartha · Rating 5 out of 5]

When I first saw this book it appeared to be just another Indian novel. But then
the description on the back cover termed it as a travelogue. The author takes us on an all India tour, showing the realities that exists in the country, this is not a book on the tourist destinations of India but about the harsh, bitter and some times the sweet side of modern India. The author has travelled the breadth and depth of the country, sometimes throwing in pieces of history and culture about a place, a person or about an incident.

[Pallavi Kamat · Rating 3 out of 5]

Could have done without the 'Hungry India, Poor India' narrative. But there are some poignant & interesting moments in the book as well. Small-town India had huge aspirations 20 years back! It will be interesting to revisit these towns now & see the progress there.

Need to put up a detailed review later!

[Hardeep · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was a great read... The author travels "off the beaten path" with everyday people and writes about his conversations with them. Marvellous portrayal of traveling in India, the way the locals do!

[Jyothykumar · Rating 4 out of 5]

Superb stuff! Mishra's 'nook & cranny' detail amazes me. I wish I could rival his eye for detailed observation & be able to translate it to prose!! Excellent English!!

[Freya · Rating 2 out of 5]

Pankaj Mishra’s book Butter Chicken In Ludhiana is not a must read but you could call it a good read.

The book is a travelogue of Mishra’s travels in small (small he says, I would say somewhat small) towns of India. It is a good book in the literary sense, the language flows well but literary isn’t all that is important in a book.

The book is pretty entertaining but personally I didn’t find it very insightful. Mishra seems to have a problem with everything, you hardly find him appreciating anything. He has covered quite a few towns but somehow I felt he has left out North East India and quite a lot of the South. He has a lot of complaints about each town and its people, though some of the stories he recounts of people are entertaining and have a ring of truth to them. He hardly seems to look around the places he goes to. He just keeps meeting people.

Another thing I noticed is that he uses big words where small ones would have sufficed and maybe would have expressed what he wanted to convey better.

What I would give most credit to, would be Mishra’s interaction with people. He looks up someone or the other in almost every place, and his conversations are enlightening at times and ridiculous sometimes. Maybe he should have said ‘People in small towns of India’ rather than ‘Travels in small towns of India’.

I found Mishra very superficial, if he had just looked beyond or below the surface he might have found something’s that would have touched him and things he would have liked.

On the whole this book is one you can repeatedly read, and you will always find something you missed out last time. This book is for a select lot, it isn’t what everyone can read.

Full review on my blog

[Avibhajya · Rating 1 out of 5]

There is only one reason to read this book - understand the JNUtards' hatred for India, Indian culture, and for their own genetics.

I read this book (circa 2007) when I was not familiar with JNU or the Urban naxals of India. But I was astonished to see a book in which author has traveled across India and has found only filth, disease, mental degeneracy, immorality, and mental bankruptcy. The only two good thing he found in India were in the communist Kerala - a mallu who had read western literature extensively and of course Arundhati Roy (and her mother).

A decade ago, I was puzzled to read such venom against India. Today, it is well established who these people are and who nurtures them. In art, literature, activism, Bollywood, the Urban Naxals of India are lapped up by the west and made into de facto authorities on India so that they could create atrocity literature and propaganda against India. It's very much like casting couch of the cine industry - if you have no morals, you go places.

Pankaj Mishra since then has been contributing to New York Times, The Guardian, the New Yorker, London Review of Books, Bloomberg View, Wall Street Journal, New Republic, Washington Post, Boston Globe, Time, The Independent, Etc.

Mr Pankaj Mishtra - like you, I also wish you were not born in India. May you and your handlers go to hell!

[Aravind P · Rating 3 out of 5]

A decent book. Pankaj Mishra is a very hygiene conscious middle class chap, so as expected, it had all those commentary on overflowing gutters, unclean surroundings and stuffs like that. It was fine but started annoying when he kept repeating the same stuff as he moved around the country.
Keeping that out, the book was a nice travelogue. It was not about places to visit or sights to see. But his own experiences while traveling around the country and meeting people with various ideologies, frustrations and ambitions. Those were the unique things that attracted me in this book. His writings were also very smooth and easy, with sufficient dose of cynicism, humor and awe.

[Vinod · Rating 1 out of 5]

Normally I'm too lazy to write a review especially for a book that I didn't care much for. But this one was revolting enough to force me to write one. The snobbery on display on every page is irritating at first and soon makes the book unreadable. Every incident described reeks of contemptuousness and Mishra is a great example of why a 20 something old getting a contract to write a sociological piece about a complex society is a bad idea.

I'm reminded of a scene from 'Munnabhai MBBS', where Arshad Warsi's character lures a tourist by promising him a sight of the 'hungry India , poor India'. You could replace the tourist with Mishra and this book is what you would end up with

[Aditi Chandak · Rating 4 out of 5]

I, for one, found solace in this debut novel - it made up for all the travelling I couldn't do in 2020. It brought back so many memories I'd wanted to cite as anecdotes in my writings but could never really come around to it - maybe someday! I wish there were a more recent version of it, what with the advent of technology and people not wanting to talk to each other, with the same kind of stark honesty and intricate details.

P.S. If anyone has any suggestions, do let me know!

[Radhika · Rating 3 out of 5]

The book is set in the 1990s India, which is very different from 2013 when I read it. It made me nostalgic...not to mention thankful about the things that have changed for the better in India in the past 20 years. Overall, an entertaining read, but not the best from this author.
Read this book after I read Pankaj Mishra's 'From the ruins of Empire"- which I absolutely loved!.

[Gagan Gupta · Rating 1 out of 5]

It's an amateurish rant that shows the author's typical Indian mentality of considering oneself more civilized than the rest of the "illiterate savages" he encounters during his journey. It starts off being a bit humorous, but after a while the author's rant and venomous cynicism gets intolerable.

[Manu · Rating 1 out of 5]

A complete waste of time. It's amazing that after completing half the book i was still waiting for the author to write at least one good thing about small towns in india and the title is completely misleading.

[Yigal Zur · Rating 4 out of 5]

funny and full with color

[Rishi Sahgal · Rating 3 out of 5]

Written by a very young Mishra, this book demonstrates an ability to write with descriptive flair and dark humour, and can be insightful at times. Unfortunately this book suffers from the dual perils of youth- A simplistic worldview limited by a lack of experience and wisdom, coupled with a lack of humility and self awareness of this aforementioned lack of experience.

Mishra is clearly disappointed by the crassness of modernity in recently liberalised India, and there's enough to legitimately be disappointed about. But his book seems to lack sufficient context or real research. While I understand that it is a travelogue, it seems that his travels were poorly planned and his perspective informed by his encounters with a few unrepresentative people, without much context, except for his own yet to be fully formed worldview.

There is also a disturbing classism to his sardonic observations, without even a little bit of reflection or acknowledgement of the limitation of the lens from which his point of view is being expressed. This is disappointing because there is a world where this could have been a much better book... perhaps if he had written it a few years later with more experience under his belt.

[Piku Sonali · Rating 3 out of 5]

The perfect butter chicken consists of bite-sized tender succulent pieces of chicken ensconed in a rich aromatic gravy. The perfect butter chicken is neither spicy nor sweet but manages to capture that right balance of flavour. It is a dish that non-veg lovers swear by and an interesting title of a book whose author is a vegetarian. That Mishra is a vegetarian is evident when you consider the butter chicken he produces ends up being slightly off-taste, failing to meet expectations. The writing is good, engaging enough to hold your attention. But after one point you get tired of Mishra's constant condescending tone and nitpicking. It's wonderful to read about the various small Indian towns and what makes them click. And I do understand that the book was written in the 90s so two decades apart it probably offers a different experience but I wish Mishra's observations weren't this shallow. Considering he was only 25 when he wrote this book and the books he has gone on to write, it would be interesting to see his development as a writer over the years. Definitely not the last Pankaj Mishra book I'll read.

[Jaya]

Pankaj Mishra wrote this book in his twenties, and going by the afterword, feels about it the way I do about the blogs I wrote in my twenties. The tone is that of someone trying to be a wise man of the world, despite knowing very little about it. While a few interesting encounters slip in, most of the conversations feel jaded and repetitive. As if that weren't enough, there is a section where the meaning of "sexual harassment" has to be explained to him by a white woman in Benares. Did Mishra grow up in such a cloistered world that he didn't know of what women went through on the streets of India? There is a good deal of disdain for the newly rich, for the emerging middle class, for people who are not well-versed with English or European literature.

I have chosen not to rate this book because Mishra himself says that the book reminded him of his "younger, callow, unresolved self, which had assumed positions of intellectual and moral authority without quite earning the always provisional right to them". The condescension has hopefully lessened in his future books.

[Mbhatia · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book reminded me of a three week trip by train, bus, car, airplane and rickshaw that my husband and I took 12 years ago. Not only did we go to some of the places the author visited but we seemed to have similar experiences.
Other parts of the book reminded me of our honeymoon trip to Kulu-Manali 54 years ago, when we had to sleep in an abandoned veterinary hospital after the arrangements that had been made in our behalf fell through. When I asked where the toilet was, I was shown a bucket and a hole in the wall! Needless to say, I had a stiff drink before I slept.
The author's voice felt genuine as he described his experiences. He reported that he would often unobtrusively be taking notes while the people he encountered in route talked.