India Calling

Reversing his parents’ immigrant path, a young American-born writer returns to India and discovers an old country making itself new.   Anand Giridharadas sensed something was afoot as his plane from America prepared to land in Bombay. An elderly passenger looked at him and said, ‘We’re all trying to go that way,’ pointing to the rear. ‘You,’ he added, as if seeking to alert him to a ticketing error, ‘you’re going this way?’ Giridharadas was returning to India amid an unlikely economic boom. But he was interested less in its gold rush than in its cultural upheaval, as a new generation has sought to reconcile old traditions and customs with new ambitions and dreams. In India Calling, one of the most vivid and perceptive accounts of the country in recent memory, Giridharadas journeys through India, artfully documenting change and conflict through keenly observed stories. He writes of a dynamic low-caste man in a small town who pulls himself up into the new India; of a progressive urban woman torn between her desires and the wishes of her parents; of a lonely man in Punjab who clings to old notions of honour even as money replaces it as the currency of prestige; of a ‘part-time’ revolutionary who worked as a journalist by day and a Naxalite by night; of Mukesh Ambani, perhaps the most powerful private citizen of India, whose success speaks of an India free from its colonial baggage. Telling these stories through the prism of his own emigre family history and his childhood memories of India, Giridharadas shows how India is reinventing itself: how parents and children, husbands and wives, cousins and siblings are seizing hold of their destinies, bending the meaning of Indianness, and enduring the pangs of the old birthing the new. The result is this remarkable debut: an intimate portrait of a country becoming modern while striving to remain itself. Advance praise For India Calling ‘…an engrossing and acutely observed appreciation of a country that is at once old and new…’  Amartya Sen ‘Anand Giridharadas is more than just a widely admired journalist; with India Calling he has transformed into a fluent, witty, and intelligent writer. His very personal and perceptive look at the new India is a memorable debut, full of insight and diversion.’ -William Dalrymple, author of Nine Lives: In Search of the Sacred in Modern India ‘The emergence of a more dynamic India has been widely observed. Less well understood are the myriad reinventions that make the new India so exciting. In India Calling, Anand Giridharadas renders this change on an intimate scale with a tapestry of keenly observed stories about the changing dreams and frustrations of all walks of Indians – and his own. Savvy and often moving, India Calling is for those who prefer the view from the ground than from thirty thousand feet.’ -Edward Luce, author of In Spite of the Gods: The Rise of Modern India ‘Rarely has an author deciphered the Indian enigma the way Anand Giridharadas does in India Calling. By lucidly portraying the country’s real locomotive – its vast and populous youth – he provides the most timely and elegant guide to perhaps the most important next generation in the world.’ -Parag Khanna, author of The Second World and How to Run the World