Paperback
-
PICK UP IN STORECheck Availability at Nearby Stores
Available within 2 business hours
Related collections and offers
Overview
A New Yorker Contributors' Pick 2012
A Newsweek "Must Read on Modern India"
“For people who savored Katherine Boo’s Behind the Beautiful Forevers.”—Evan Osnos, newyorker.com
From the author of Better To Have Gone, a portrait of the incredible change and economic development of modern India, and of social and national transformation there told through individual lives
Raised in India, and educated in the U.S., Akash Kapur returned to India in 2003 to raise a family. What he found was an ancient country in transition. In search of the life that he and his wife want to lead, he meets an array of Indians who teach him much about the realities of this changed country: an old landowner sees his rural village destroyed by real estate developments, and crime and corruption breaking down the feudal authority; a 21-year-old single woman and a 35-year-old divorcee exploring the new cultural allowances for women; and a young gay man coming to terms with his sexual identity – something never allowed him a generation ago.
As Akash and his wife struggle to find the right balance between growth and modernity and the simplicity and purity they had known from the Indian countryside a decade ago, they ultimately find a country that “has begun to dream.” But also one that may be moving away too quickly from the valuable ways in which it is different.
Product Details
ISBN-13: | 9781594486531 |
---|---|
Publisher: | Penguin Publishing Group |
Publication date: | 03/05/2013 |
Pages: | 336 |
Product dimensions: | 5.40(w) x 8.10(h) x 0.90(d) |
Age Range: | 18 Years |
About the Author
Table of Contents
Prologue 1
Part I
Golden Times 15
Demographic Dividends 43
The Shandy 77
Garden City 111
A Drowning 143
Part II
Blindness 169
Goondagiri 195
Dioxins 220
Hard Times 243
Reality 269
Acknowledgments 288
Glossary 291
What People are Saying About This
Through a series of deft character sketches, Akash Kapur captures the contradictions of life in modern India between city and country, technology and aesthetics, development and the environment, greed and selflessness, individual fulfilment and community obligation. His writing is fresh and vivid; his perspective, empathetic and appealingly non-judgemental. (Ramachandra Guha, author of India after Gandhi)
Akash Kapur is a wonderful writer: a courageously clear-eyed observer, an astute listener, a masterful portraitist, and a gripping story teller. His voice is as sure and as intimate as his subject is chaotic and immense, and he proves himself the perfect guide to the enthralling promise and the terrifying menace of a society in the throes of colossal, epochal, all-encompassing change.
Akash Kapur invites us to explore a country collapsing with contradictions. A place where the "successful" amass mountainous credit-card debt while three hundred million live on less than a dollar a day, a place where more people have cell phones than access to a toilet. I have never been to India, but after reading Kapur's fascinating and absorbing book I almost feel as if I have. (David Lida, author of First Stop in the New World: Mexico City, the Capital of the 21st Century)
Akash Kapur lives in and writes out of an India that few writers venture into. Curious, suspicious of received wisdom, and intellectually resourceful, his writing has established him as one of the most reliable observers of the New India. (Pankaj Mishra, author of Temptations of the West: How to Be Modern in India, Pakistan, Tibet, and Beyond)
“A fascinating look at the transformation of India, with broader lessons on the upside and downside of progress.”—Booklist (starred)
“[A] Lively, anecdotal look at the people who have been vastly changed by the entrepreneurial explosion in India. . . . An honest, conflicted glimpse of a country.”—Kirkus
Beautifully written...Akash Kapur celebrates the gains and mourns the losses, conveying a complex story through the ups and downs of the lives of some fascinating individual women and men. (Kwame Anthony Appiah, author of Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers)
Akash Kapur's marvellous book is unique in looking mainly at the south and in a detailed and intimate away at village life. He shows how the old rural cycle of the south Indian village depicted and romanticised by RK Narayan is fracturing and breaking apart to reveal a very new more unstable world where the old certainties are disappearing and everything is up for grabs. Sharp-eyed, insightful, skillfully-sketched and beautifully written, India Becoming is the remarkable debut of a distinctive new talent. (William Dalrymple, author of Nine Lives: In Search of the Sacred in Modern India)
India today is in the midst of profound change and Akash Kapur captures the impact of that change on the lives of ordinary Indians with a narrative that avoids all clichés, platitudes, and simplifications. (Gurcharan Das, author of India Unbound)