akashkapur.com

Time magazine on India Becoming

akash — Mon, 30 Jan 2012 13:23:22 +0000

Pico Iyer has a great column in a recent issue of Time that highlights India Becoming. "Impressively lucid and searching," he calls the book. "In his clarity, sympathy and impeccably sculpted prose, Kapur often summons the spirit of V.S. Naipaul."

Jaipur’s Silver Lining

akash — Mon, 30 Jan 2012 05:52:55 +0000

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).

Depressing: India has world’s most toxic air

akash — Mon, 30 Jan 2012 05:43:28 +0000

According to a recent study by Yale and Columbia universities, India has the most toxic air in the world. The study also produced a composite index of environmental indicators, on which India ranked in the last ten. Depressing, frightening, and rings all too true for many of us who live next to steaming garbage dumps or in over-crowded cities.

Videos from the Jaipur Lit Fest

akash — Mon, 30 Jan 2012 05:38:25 +0000

Jaipur was a wonderful, over-the-top and amazingly stimulating experience. Don't believe everything you read in the papers. There was a lot more than the Salman Rushdie controversy going on there. Here are two video links of the talks I did, both from Saturday, January 21st. In the morning, I moderated a discussion with Philip Gourevitch. We talked, among other things, about genocide, political violence, interventionism, humanitarianism, and narrative non-fiction writing. In the afternoon, I was on a panel of travel writers reading from their works. I read (last) from India Becoming.

Further demolishing the Chindia myth

akash — Thu, 19 Jan 2012 09:33:04 +0000

According to a Chinese government report, the country's urban population for the first time topped 50%. In India, 70% of the population is still rural. Yet another reason why the frequent coupling of these two (future?) world powers is simplistic and mistaken.

Rushdie’s visit to Jaipur; censorship and illiberalism in India

akash — Wed, 18 Jan 2012 06:05:38 +0000

Things are getting hairy at the Jaipur Lit Fest, with protests and threats surrounding Salman Rushdie's visit. For many writers--myself included--this is yet another sad chapter in what feels like a rising tide of intolerance and illiberalism in the country. Will threats of violence succeed in keeping Rushdie away? I hope not. See this artice on the Jaipur controversy; and this earlier piece, by Basharat Peer, on "India's Free-Speech Crisis."

Jaipur Lit Fest

akash — Mon, 16 Jan 2012 06:28:48 +0000

This year's Jaipur Literature Festival looks absolutely wonderful. I'm honored and excited to be part of it. Check out the list of speakers and the program. What a lineup. My events on are on March 21st.

Wing It With The Butterflies

akash — Tue, 01 Nov 2011 06:16:08 +0000

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.

Why didn’t Raj Rajaratnam take a plea bargain?

akash — Mon, 24 Oct 2011 09:19:25 +0000

A great piece by Suketu Mehta in this week's Newsweek. A couple of exclusive interviews really offer insight into Raj Rajaratnam the man, and particularly how his South Asian background and milieu have shaped him. I've often wondered, while watching this case, why Rajaratnam didn't take a plea bargain. Now I think I understand better.

Chiang Mai State of Mind

akash — Sat, 22 Oct 2011 12:07:51 +0000

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.