India Calling: An Intimate Portrait of a Nation's Remaking

I should like to differ from the review titled "An NRI (PIO) rant full of bias".

Mr. Giridharadas, unlike the pantheon/choir of Robyn Meredith, Gurcharan Das, Shashi Tharoor and Mira Kamdar et.al, probes deep into the morphing of India's socio-economic terrain. Unlike, the pantheon/choir mentioned, he does not allow his multi-dimensional analyses to be taken hostage of by the monomaniacal financial hubris of the double-digit growth, which is the unquestionable canon of the Shining India narrative and its attendant hubris.

Mr. Giridharadas, is an astute and mature observer-participant in the changing psyche of India. An India, which he had no compulsion to seek out. Surely, his American Mid-Western upbringing placed no burden on him to make this old-world pilgrimage. Yet he did it of his own volition, certainly not at the behest of a set of goading parents. He did it, because India genuinely enthralled him, given its chaos and potential.

Unlike many NRIs, Mr. Giridharadas, didn't have the legacy of ossified nostalgia, nor the luxury of surplus pelf for gratuitous investment opportunities. Instead, he invested five odd years in interpreting the many changes afoot in India and educating Americans and the West of its possible import. Instead of seeking a material legacy, his dispatches from India will be an intellectual capital that students of India in the near and distant future, will find a rich reference. Indeed, Mr. Giridharadas's own website, provides access to nearly everyone of those articles published by the New York Times / International Herald Tribune. It reveals a sweep of dynamics, every bit in the same vein as Alistair Cooke's dispatches from America to his native United Kingdom.

India is changing. For sure. But how? To whose benefit? The transformation in infrastructure (that too mostly shoddy and ill planned) is only one aspect of development. What about the 'developments' on the emotional terrain. Who are those who are being left behind in this heady adrenalin rush to arrive at the threshold of economic take-off? These are issues, that can benefit much from having an 'outsider' (though Mr. Giridharadas is not a deserving candidate for that appellation.); take a closer look.

India's polity, policies, politics and polemics, need greater scrutiny and debate. A democracy, especially a parliamentary democracy; cannot by definition and surely not, by inclination, shy from the very act of actively seeking dialogue, or whole-heartedly engaging in it. Those critics, who find Mr.Giridharadas's observation and cautionary narrative offensive, would do well to ponder, that the cheerleaders of Indian media selectively devalue the critics in our own midst. PS.Sainath, Amit Bhaduri and Harsh Mander; these are the honest Indian voices in the wilderness. They too, have often raised their concern about the apathy of the Indian elites. While, we may indeed isolate the conscientious in our midst; the world won't endorse that approach. And Mr.Giridharadas's India Calling is express proof of it. It is the first serious work by a 'foreign' journalist, since Edward Luce's In Spite of the Gods; to critique India's lop-sided 'growth' paradigm. An parallel read to Mssrs. Giridharadas and Luce's works would be Rana Dasgupta's excellent essay, Capital Gain, published in Granta 107. The travesty of the tryst, cannot be denied anymore. Nor the utterance of the nation's soul, muffled.

Do read India Calling. And seek reforms. Lest, someday, we may regret our lack of alacrity.