• About



    My book, India Becoming, will be published on March 15th, 2012. Read an excerpt in The New Yorker.

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  • Highlights

    I write a lot about development and change in modern India--how new wealth is changing the country, for better and for worse. See these reports from the International Herald Tribune and The New York Times. (1, 2).

    I'm particularly interested in (and concerned by) the environmental destruction being wrought by development. See this report on coastal erosion from Granta, and this report on India's garbage crisis.

    I've also written on development for The Atlantic (an essay review on Amartya Sen ) and The Economist (on the digital divide).

    I've written several literary essays and reviews over the years. See this one on VS Naipaul, from Transition, and this one on Indian literature, from The New Statesman.

    Two articles on the five-year anniversary of the tsunami (1, 2), from The International Herald Tribune and The New York Times. These follow-up from my two original reports on the tsunami, published in The New Yorker (1, 2).

highlights

The Picador Book of Modern Indian Writing

Monday, August 13th, 2001
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Review of The Picador Book of Modern Indian Writing, edited by Amit Chaudhuri, The New Statesman
Anyone turning to this anthology in search of a tradition is likely to be rather bewildered by the bedlam of languages, themes and genres. But perhaps there is method in this madness. So many of the pieces in this collection suffer the same absence of a tradition that, at some point, it seems churlish to insist on calling it an absence.

Subcontinental Divide

Sunday, December 10th, 2000
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Review of The Other Side of Silence, by Urvashi Butalia, The New York Times Book Review

A Third Way for the Third World

Tuesday, December 14th, 1999
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A review of Development as Freedom, by Amartya Sen, published in The Atlantic Monthly.
Ultimately, this is the significance of Sen’s synthesis: in pairing the orthodoxy with its critique, in using the language of the establishment to challenge the establishment, Sen has stretched the boundaries of development far wider than development’s critics have themselves managed to do.