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    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).

writing

Jaipur’s Silver Lining

Sunday, January 29th, 2012
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The Daily Beast

But then, walking the grounds, resolutely avoiding the chaotic Oprah show, I started thinking: Wouldn’t it actually be amazing, wouldn’t it in a bizarre way say something magnificent about this country, if there were a stampede at a literary festival? For that, at its core, despite the hordes, despite the socialites and their Prada bags and gold jewelry, is what Jaipur remains: a festival about books and literature, a destination for people who resolutely–and miraculously–still care about ideas.

There was a wonderful serendipity to the place, a quality of intellectual discovery and chance encounters with interesting people that reminded me of my student days. Diggi Palace felt like a college campus–full of newness and potential (and, yes, the possibility of an invitation to late-night, boozy parties).

Wing It With The Butterflies

Monday, October 31st, 2011
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Lead Essay, from Outlook magazine’s 16th anniversary issue

It is good to remember, on this two-decade anniversary of the nation’s reforms, that a generation is generally said to last about 20 years. In this hyper-sped-up world that we inhabit, it is probably fair to assume that that cycle has been compressed; and, by that standard, many of today’s youth can be said to inhabit a second post-liberalisation generation.

For this generation—“liberalisation’s grandchildren”, as they should perhaps be called—the encounter with modernity and capitalism is a lot more nuanced than it seemed in the years immediately following the advent of reforms. Those years were marked by a certain euphoria, a sense of exultation and release from the drabness of post-independence socialism. But now some of that euphoria has worn out; it has become clear that India’s rapid growth and development, while wonderful, are also a little more ambivalent than anticipated.

Today’s generation knows that wealth and success can take many forms: it is the entrepreneurial prowess and innovation of India’s world-class businesses, but it is also the corruption of an oligarchic political and business class that has bent reforms to its own interests. Rapid growth, too, has many faces. It is the story of immeasurably widened horizons, of self-made young men and women who have risen further than their fathers could have ever dreamed; but economic growth is also spawning new forms of inequality and social exclusion, and terrible environmental depredation.

Chiang Mai State of Mind

Saturday, October 22nd, 2011
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Conde Nast Traveller

My mind was still in overdrive when we landed in Chiang Mai on that early morning. As we came down over the flat land–the low-slung concrete houses, the rice fields that extended towards distant, misty hills–I found myself meticulously, and a little obsessively, building a taxonomy of holidays. I thought of all the reasons there are for taking a vacation. A man (or a woman) can take a sightseeing holiday. There are, too, cultural holidays, religious holidays, historical holidays, wellness holidays, and culinary holidays. Then there are retail holidays and wildlife holidays, and, though I aver I have never taken one, there are carnal holidays.

I was in Chiang Mai for yet another kind of holiday. I had come to this ancient city of wats and orange clad monks, this centre of culture and learning, in search of what, that morning on the plane, I had decided to label a real holiday, a holiday holiday. I had spent the previous months (or was it years?) holed up in a cottage in my backyard, desperately trying to finish a book against a final, non-negotiable deadline. Like some kind of hibernating beast–or like a prisoner–I had lost contact with the world. I saw few people; I rarely left my neighbourhood.

By the time my family and I arrived in Chiang Mai, I was in a state of nervous exhaustion. Writing a book is like making sausage. The author is meat, thrown into a machine, ground down and spat out in a horribly attenuated, unrecognisable form. My wife and two boys, who had suffered every minute of the sausage factory with me, were similarly worn out. We all felt we’d earned a respite. In Chiang Mai, I resolved, I would slow my mind, regain a semblance of balance, centre myself—-and take the only kind of holiday really worth having.

Rural India Disappears

Monday, October 10th, 2011
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Blog Post, The New Yorker Online

Jawaharlal Nehru, India’s first prime minister, famously described the country as an “ancient palimpsest on which layer upon layer” of history had been inscribed, without ever fully effacing the previous ones. Sometimes, though, I can’t help feeling that this place is less a palimpsest than a brutal, erasable slate: layer upon layer of newness, the past a commodity, disposable and easily forgotten.

Podcast

Tuesday, October 4th, 2011
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The New Yorker Out Loud

Podcast
NY Online
I talk to Blake Eskin, Online Editor at The New Yorker, about changes in the cow market, the rural economy, and growing up in a world that’s gradually slipping away.

I talk to Blake Eskin,  Online Editor at The New Yorker, about changes in the cow market, the rural economy–and growing up in a world that’s gradually slipping away.

The Shandy

Tuesday, October 4th, 2011
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This is an excerpt from my upcoming book, India Becoming, published this week in The New Yorker. Check back here to learn more about the book, or pre-order now at Amazon or Flipkart.

The India to which I had recently returned, after more than a decade in America, was a markedly new one: a country where rice fields were giving way to highways, farmland to software complexes, and saris to pants. I’d followed the country’s economic resurgence during my time abroad and was eager to see the changes for myself. In America, my friends were worried about losing their jobs; they held on to what they had. But in India people I knew were quitting their jobs, casting aside the safety of well-established careers for the excitement—and potential riches—of starting their own business. Every other person I met dreamed of being an entrepreneur.

Indian cities felt simple; they embraced modernity unhesitatingly, even exuberantly. But in rural India, where I had grown up, and to which I had now returned, the nation’s transformation felt more complex. The sense of progress was often accompanied by a sense of loss; the celebration of the new was tinged with a longing for the old. The Indian countryside felt layered, nuanced—and sometimes a little bewildering. I often had a hard time knowing what to make of the new world emerging around me.

“If you really want to see how the villages are changing, you should visit a shandy,” I was told by a friend. It was he who introduced me to Ramadas that morning at the cow market. “He’s famous here,” my friend said. “Everybody knows Ramadas.”

A Parable of the New India

Sunday, July 3rd, 2011
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Review of Miss New India, by Bharati Mukherjee, The New York Times Book Review

Nations are narratives. Every country is shaped by its particular set of ideas and myths. Inevitably these are simplifications, often clichés, but they hold a country together, imposing a certain coherence on diverse populations.

The narrative of modern India has changed over the last few decades. For much of its post-independence history, India epitomized the concept of the Third World. It was a land of desolate poverty and immutable hierarchy — “an area of darkness,” in the memorable title of V. S. Naipaul’s first book about the country; a place of “heat and dust,” in the only slightly less dismal title of Ruth Prawer Jhabvala’s 1975 novel. But now India is moving on, and so is the Indian narrative. The country has grown rapidly since the early 1990s, when its stultified socialist economy began to be reformed. Today, as India has become an increasingly confident world power, the old stories are being replaced by new ones — many equally clichéd — about boundless opportunity, tremendous wealth, social mobility and technological prowess.

Modern India’s Dance of Creation and Destruction

Wednesday, February 2nd, 2011
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My last Letter from India for The International Herald Tribune. Thanks to all of you who have read it over the years. Keep checking here for more articles, and for information on my upcoming book.

India is today in the midst of a transformation whose scale and significance (at least when measured by the number of people being affected) are rivaled only by China’s recent transition. Sometimes, when I think of how much things are changing around here, when I reflect on the way in which societies and traditions built up over centuries and millenniums have been dismantled in just a couple of decades, I feel as if I have a ringside view at the unfolding of history.

This massive transformation of the country could not be anything but messy. It seems inevitable, really, that the process of cultural and social reinvention would be experienced as a form of upheaval, a delicate dance between building up and tearing down, between the thrill of the new and the chaos (and sorrow) of losing the old.

Indian Scavengers Doing What Officials Can’t

Wednesday, January 19th, 2011
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Letter from India, The International Herald Tribune

India generates more than 100 million tons of municipal waste a year. On a per capita basis, this is far lower than most developed countries, but the amount of garbage generated is growing fast. More problematically, very little of India’s waste is properly treated. The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development estimates that only about 60 percent of municipal waste in the country is even collected. A far smaller proportion is recycled.

A few municipalities have made efforts to improve the situation. In some cities, governments have teamed up with the private sector or nonprofit organizations to improve waste collection and recycling. But such efforts are small and generally geographically restricted.

If there is any hope, it may lie — as with so much else in the country — in the nation’s burgeoning informal economy. Across India, an army of scavengers and housewives and small traders collect, segregate and recycle garbage every day. Their efforts, and the economy they have built around waste, may represent a model, or at least a foundation, for a solution to the nation’s rising tide of garbage.

India’s informal economy is huge. According to a recent study conducted by the International Labor Organization, an astounding 93 percent of India’s population is employed outside the formal sector. No reliable statistics exist to indicate how many of these jobs are in waste, but the numbers are certainly in the millions.

The Success of Ordinary Indians

Wednesday, January 5th, 2011
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Letter from India, The International Herald Tribune

This has been a momentous decade for India. Economically, in particular, the nation has made huge strides. Although its revitalization began in the 1980s and ’90s, the last decade has been marked by a noticeable acceleration of growth rates.

High growth rates have not automatically translated into universal prosperity. India is still haunted by tremendous, often mind-boggling, poverty and inequality. Nonetheless, the widening of horizons and prospects is unmissable, and undeniable.

As the new decade begins, I want to focus on the lives that have been lifted up since the start of the millennium. I have room to tell only four life stories. There are millions more like these. But these four men and women capture some of the hope that marks India today, and that casts little pools of light amid the shadows of deprivation that have for so long defined this country.