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

The best description for India Calling that I can think of is "Indians for Dummies", those three words describe both what is great about the book and what its limitations are. Its a great way to quickly learn about the India, its people, its customs and shared heritage, but always keeping in mind, that what you learn is only an approximation.

Indian emigre's usually are much more conservative than Indians back home. Their "Indian" values and customs stop evolving as soon as they leave India, so ironically enough when they go back to India, they usually find that Indians have progressed far while they still have a vision of India that is stuck in the past. Our author also suffers from this, since his version of India is from 1970's. His problems are compounded because his India of background in India was in the british influenced upperclass household that has as much in common with a average Indian as Paris Hilton with average American.

The book is basically a series of character portraits of a number of Indians. A long chapter on Ambani's seems out of place, it looks more like a piece for Vanity Fair rather than saying anything insightful about India. Moreover, that one chapter also undoes a major theme at the beginning of the book - that India in 1970's was a stifling place where to be successful you had to emigrate. Ambani's were contemporary of author's parents and brought up in much poorer circumstances, still they were able to reach epitome of success in India.

The most interesting parts of the books were little insights into Indian society, and a way of looking at them that I never did. The author is at his greatest when he talks about the individual and families, the "the family relations of guilt", "the vibration and madness that numbed one's sensitivity to oneself", "lightness of being without roots". At the other end of the spectrum, I thought he failed miserably when he tried to talk about the overarching conflicts and path of history and society. A section on Maoist insurgency is shallow, at times devolving into meaningless drivel you will expect in a liberal arts journal

"Just as the new self-confidence in India was nourishing a rediscovery of traditional ways, so, too, the individuation ushered in by modernity was, in fact, ..., a return to the past, to an older pattern of division known from the villages."

How any of it is relevant to realities of Maoist insurgency and mass killings is left to reader's imagination. Talking about corruption and Amabani's it seems that author was one of those "journalists covering the company were made part of the family". PR department of Reliance Industries could not have written a better profile of Mukesh Ambani.

For all the harsh words, I enjoyed reading the book. It broadens your horizons and shows you a different way of looking at things. Overall a pretty decent book.