A rosy view of India's 'awakening' without the disruptions

India Calling

An Intimate Portrait of a Nation's Remaking

nolead begins By Anand Giridharadas

Times Books. 288 pp. $25

nolead ends nolead begins

By Madhusree Mukherjee

Anand Giridharadas was born in a suburb of Cleveland, Ohio, to Indian immigrant parents who "dug in, assimilated, gave my sister and me childhoods with all the American fixin's."

When the family visited relatives back in India, loaded with gifts from the coveted land, envious cousins would ask Anand if he felt Indian or American. "American," the boy would respond: "because I felt that to answer otherwise would be somehow to debase myself, to accept a lower berth in the world."

Yet at the age of 21, Giridharadas moved to the land his parents had left behind. It was the 21st century, India's economy had liberalized, and he sensed a thawing of tradition and bureaucracy, a dawning of hope.

Giridharadas worked in Mumbai, first as a business consultant for McKinsey and then as a correspondent for the New York Times and the International Herald Tribune. Gazing down upon India from the high-rise apartments of the rich and the PR offices of the powerful, he internalized the phosphorescent worldview of his privileged acquaintances: His prose glows with positivity. As he sees it, economic reform is rescuing Indians from the communities in which they have been "trapped" for eons. But Giridharadas appears rarely, if ever, to have stepped inside a mud hut, or otherwise bothered to check the facts on the ground. His book reveals the storytelling abilities of this gifted young writer - as well as his misleading, poorly-informed optimism about India's future.

"It was partly the enormous physical churn: the quantities of earth being moved, the malls and office towers and gated communities being built, the restaurants opening, the factories pumping out cars," Giridharadas writes. What interested him even more than the physical upheaval was the spiritual one. He saw low-caste youths daring to aspire to diplomas, women becoming breadwinners, villagers moving to towns: "India was erupting in dreams."

India Calling is a collection of portraits of dreamers. Ravindra escaped his village by learning English, emulating the dress sense and mannerisms of the rich, and reading Dale Carnegie's How to Win Friends and Influence People. He ended up a roller-skating coach and owner of a spoken-English academy, "arguably the most important and well-known young man" in the small town of Umred.

Billionaire industrialist Mukesh Ambani grew up in a crowded Mumbai tenement where neighbors served as extended family and children "moved in snack-seeking cohorts from one household to the next." He learned quickly that business is "a street fight" and that government officials who are on your side must be cared for as if they were relatives.

Mallika, an investment banker in Delhi, lives off her parents despite her ample salary, enjoys the gifts and attentions of older men - and verbally abuses the man who loves her and whom she intends to marry.

Giridharadas' observations of upper-class Indian mores are spot-on. "On Saturday mornings, after a drunken night out, a young man might sit with his parents on either side of him, short-listing brides with mouse clicks": weird but all too true. When, however, he stretches these insights into broad maxims about Indian society, Giridharadas overreaches.

After describing the dubious business methods of Ambani, for instance, he condescendingly attributes these to the "more flexible morality" of Indians, whereas the honesty of his own grandfather derives from the British colonial tradition. Some women he met "could not even name a favorite television show, so blank had their minds become in a world with no use for their minds."

Most gratingly, Giridharadas regards modern India's "awakening" as even more meaningful than its 1947 independence from the United Kingdom: "This time it felt less theoretical; this time it felt like another kind of independence - an independence of the soul, not just of the nation." He seems to be oblivious to the fact that across the fields, mountains, and coasts of India, economic liberalization is being experienced not as liberation but as assault, with the state using colonial-era laws to claim the resources of villagers and hand these over to industry. The multitudes he encounters heading to Mumbai by the trainload are driven not only by their ambition, as he would have it, but also by the destruction of their livelihoods as farmers and fishers.

Giridharadas' concession to the possibility that one man's dream can be another man's nightmare is his interview of Venugopal, a Maoist, who tells him that Indian society is congealing into a class system just as hierarchical as the old caste structure: "The new Brahmins lived in their own mental world, as the old Brahmins had done, but in lieu of reading arcane Sanskrit texts, they now read English-language newspapers that airbrushed bad news - of inequity, strife, the displacements of the new world - and spoke mostly of globalization's delights."

But Venugopal turns out to be compromised: To earn money, he has written for such capitalist institutions as the World Bank and the Economic Times, and is, Giridharadas informs us, every inch the Brahmin he abhors.

Speaking of airbrushing, a look at the author's own business reporting is instructive. In September 2008, he described a dispute over a factory being built by the prestigious Tata Group to manufacture the world's cheapest car.

"Some farmers in eastern India who sold their land to make way for the Nano factory have since been agitating to get it back," he wrote, implying that the farmers were being capricious. In fact, the fields had been seized by the state government, and thousands of the owners had refused compensation checks: They had never sold. Giridharadas went on to quote chairman Ratan Tata, who bemoaned "the violent protests" derailing the project - and failed to mention 16-year-old Tapasi Malik, who was raped and murdered, her half-burned body left smoking in a field, evidently because she had been leading demonstrations against the dispossession.

A few of the downwardly mobile do find mention in India Calling: villagers pushed out by the expansion of Hyderabad's glittering airport. But even they, we are assured by as reliable a source as the airport authorities, are being taught "airport-related skills" so they can bounce back up. Giridharadas' chapters have titles such as "Dreams," "Ambition," and "Freedom." No room here for "Despair" or "Hopelessness."

Human eyes have evolved to flit toward motion, the better to detect predators or prey. Giridharadas' eyes possess an additional refinement: They see only upward motion, the better to locate characters that bolster his thesis. Read him for entertaining vignettes of urban India - but do not imagine, as he does, that you are getting a glimpse into the soul of that beleaguered land.