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

Giridharadas, Anand

ISBN 10: 0805091777 / ISBN 13: 9780805091779

Published by Times Books, 2011

About this Item

Cloth, dj. Minor shelf-wear.

Seller Inventory # 1806090

Bibliographic Details

• Title: India Calling: An Intimate Portrait of a Nation's Remaking
• Publisher: Times Books
• Publication Date: 2011
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0805091777
• ISBN 13: 9780805091779
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition: 1st.
• Condition: Used-Very Good
• Dust Jacket Condition: Dust Jacket Included
• Seller catalogs:
  • Asian Studies

About this title

Synopsis

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, you're going this way?"

Giridharadas was returning to the land of his ancestors, 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, Giridharadas brings to life the people and the dilemmas of India today, through the prism of his émigré family history and his childhood memories of India. He introduces us to entrepreneurs, radicals, industrialists, and religious seekers, but, most of all, to Indian families. He shows how parents and children, husbands and wives, cousins and siblings are reinventing relationships, bending the meaning of Indianness, and enduring the pangs of the old birthing the new.

Through their stories, and his own, he paints an intimate portrait of a country becoming modern while striving to remain itself.

About the Author

Anand Giridharadas writes the "Currents" column for the International Herald Tribune and The New York Times online. A native of Cleveland, Ohio, and a graduate of the University of Michigan, he worked in Bombay as a management consultant until 2005, when he began reporting from that city for the Herald Tribune and the Times. He now lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.