Inhaling The Mahatma

‘When a Gandhi dies, nobody is safe. ’   An assassination and romance. A hijacking, several nuclear explosions and a religious experience...just some of the ingredients in the latest tour de force from the best-selling author of The Carpet Wars.   In the searing summer of 2004, Christopher Kremmer returns to India, a country in the grip of enormous and sometimes violent change. As a young reporter in the 1990s, he first encountered this ancient and complex civilisation. Now, embarking on a yatra, or pilgrimage, he travels the dangerous frontier where religion and politics face off. Tracking down the players in a decisive decade, he takes us inside the enigmatic Gandhi dynasty, and introduces an operatic cast of political brahmins, ‘cyber coolies’, low-caste messiahs and wrestling priests.  A sprawling portrait of India at the crossroads, Inhaling the Mahatma is also an intensely personal story about coming to terms with a dazzlingly different culture, as the author’s fate is entwined with a cosmopolitan Hindu family of Old Delhi, and a guru who might just change his life.