Akash Kapur: Writings on India, utopia, technology, tennis, travel, literature

‘‘
This is a remarkably absorbing account of an India in transition – full of challenges and contradictions, but also of expectations, hope, and ultimately optimism.”
— Amartya Sen, Nobel Laureate
‘‘
There are many virtues of Akash Kapur’s beautifully sketched portrait of modern India. The book reads like a novel. Kapur’s skill is to get people talking and to weave their stories into a necessarily messy debate about India’s future.”

— The Financial Times
‘‘
Impressively lucid and searching... In his clarity, sympathy and impeccably sculpted prose, Kapur often summons the spirit of V. S. Naipaul.”
— Pico Iyer, Time magazine
‘‘
A wonderful writer: a courageously clear-eyed
observer, an astute listener, a masterful portraitist, and a gripping storyteller.”
— Philip Gourevitch,
author of We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We
Will Be Killed With Our Families
‘‘
[R]eadable, acutely observed, and crammed with well-drawn characters.... Mr. Kapur offers a corrective to a simplistic 'new, happy narrative' of a rising India. That is welcome and he does it well.”

— The Economist
‘‘
Marvelous... Sharp-eyed, insightful, skillfully-sketched and
beautifully written, India Becoming is the
remarkable debut of a distinctive new talent.”
— William Dalrymple, author of Nine Lives
‘‘
Akash Kapur lives in and writes out of an India that few writers venture into. His writing has established him as one of the most reliable observers of the New India.”
— Pankaj Mishra, author of Temptations of the West
‘‘
Lucid, balanced. Kapur is determinedly fair-minded, neither an apologist nor a scold, and he is a wonderfully empathetic listener.”
— The New York Times Book Review
‘‘

Through a series of deft character sketches, Akash Kapur captures the contradictions of life in modern India...His writing is fresh and vivid; his perspective, empathetic and appealingly non-judgemental.”
— Ramachandra Guha,
author of India after Gandhi
‘‘
A fascinating look at the transformation of India, with broader lessons on the upside and downside of progress.”
— Booklist (starred review)

India Is Getting All the Trappings of the New Century; But Is It Modern?

July 30, 2010 | Articles |

Letter from India, The International Herald Tribune

I think it is fair to say that India has become a more modern country. It clings far less to the achievements of its ancient civilization, and looks proudly and with anticipation to the future successes of what many believe is destined to be an Indian century.

When I was a boy, India felt isolated. Today, the country is a world power, its interests and actions helping to define the contemporary global condition.

But is India really a modern nation? Modernity is layered, defined more by a state of mind than by loyalty to contemporary trends or consumer fashions. As the German philosopher and social critic Theodor Adorno put it: “Modernity is a qualitative, not a chronological, category.” Perhaps the relevant question, then, is not so much whether India is a modern nation, but what form its modernity takes.

The Promise of India’s Nascent Economy

July 5, 2010 | Articles |

Letter from India, The International Herald Tribune

This is the kind of dusty crossing that might once have been referred to as a farming town.

A couple of decades ago, it was surrounded by fields of rice and sugarcane. Agriculture was the lifeblood of the economy. Farmers clogged the streets with ox carts and gunnysacks, hawking their crops in makeshift stalls.

The stalls are still there, spilling over onto the roads and holding up traffic. It’s possible to see an occasional ox cart lumbering between flashy new cars and motorcycles. But over the years, agriculture has become less important to this town in the southern state of Tamil Nadu. Many of the fields have been sold, turned into housing projects or other real estate developments. Young people no longer become farmers; they move to the cities, in search of new opportunities.

Prying Open India’s Vast Bureaucracy

July 5, 2010 | Articles |

Letter from India, The International Herald Tribune

The Right to Information Act, passed by Parliament five years ago this week, aimed to introduce greater transparency in governance. When it was first passed, many were doubtful that it would prove effective. Skeptics predicted that officials would find a way around it. Officials themselves worried that they would be swamped by trivial and vindictive requests that would dilute the original purpose of the law.

It is true that the implementation of the act has been uneven at times. But half a decade after its passage, it is generally acknowledged as landmark legislation that is changing the relationship between citizens and their representatives; and that has the potential to transform governance in India.

Urban Greatness Awaits Good Governance

May 20, 2010 | Articles |

Letter from India, The International Herald Tribune

By virtually any measure, the quality of life in Indian cities is abysmal. Only 60 percent of municipal waste is collected. Just 30 percent of urban sewage is treated. According to a recent government study of 127 cities, 80 percent of them had at least one pollutant that exceeded air quality standards.

A few decades ago, when the vast majority of Indians lived in the countryside and when agriculture represented around a third of national income, all of this would perhaps have been cause for less concern. But today, with India rapidly urbanizing, moving to an economy where services represent more than half of gross domestic product, cities matter a lot more. They represent both the tremendous possibility of India, but also potential bottlenecks in its development.

A study released last month by McKinsey, the consulting firm, does a good job of capturing the critical role played by Indian cities. The report, titled “India’s Urban Awakening: Building Inclusive Cities, Sustaining Economic Growth,” contains an acute analysis of the opportunities and challenges presented by urban India.

Drowning in a Sea of Garbage

April 27, 2010 | Articles |

Letter from India, The International Herald Tribune

India is drowning in garbage. The cities alone generate more than 100 million tons of solid waste a year. Environment Minister Jairam Ramesh has said that if there were a Nobel Prize for filth, India would win it. It’s a damning indictment, but it rings true.

No vacant piece of land is safe, no scenic picnic spot immune. Forests are despoiled with water bottles and paper plates, rivers and canals choked with plastic bags. Smoldering landfills of the kind by my house are ubiquitous — outside (and even inside) cities, along beaches, by the side of highways, on farms and fields that have turned barren from chemicals in the waste.

In part, the country’s garbage crisis is a tale of rising consumption. According to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, Indian municipal waste is expected to increase 130 percent between 2001 and 2030, primarily due to urbanization and new prosperity. The type of waste generated is changing, too — an increase in plastics, e-waste and other hazardous and nonbiodegradable materials will only exacerbate the crisis.

Prosperity and Its Risk to Culture

April 8, 2010 | Articles |

Letter from India, The International Herald Tribune

The adulation of commerce and wealth poses important questions about the place of softer, more humanistic endeavors in the country — the role of art and artists, the place of the humanities and social sciences and, more generally, the character (and breadth) of the Indian imagination.

As India grows richer, its culture is changing. The question is whether that culture will be defined solely by the nation’s new prosperity — whether a nation in the midst of a consumerist frenzy can maintain noncommercial islands of intellectual and cultural endeavor, and whether a population determined to get rich can appreciate pursuits whose returns are less immediately tangible.

Suspicions Over Attacks Keep India Sensitive

March 25, 2010 | Articles |

Letter from India, The International Herald Tribune

For many Indians, Mr. Headley’s deal is the latest in a series of humiliating developments in the case — developments that question America’s commitment to the battle against Islamic terrorism, and more generally to the relationship between the two countries.

Almost six months after his arrest, the Indian authorities have yet to interrogate Mr. Headley. Washington’s continued refusal to grant them access has led to feverish speculation in this country. Many Indians are convinced that Mr. Headley is a C.I.A. agent, perhaps gone rogue, and that the U.S. intransigence represents an attempt to shield him and his past activities from scrutiny.

Speech by Salman Rushdie

March 23, 2010 | Blog |

A wonderful meditation on artistic freedom and tolerance (and intolerance) in India. Observations on the M. F. Hussain’s situation. Overall, an enlightening and thought-provoking speech, from the India Today Conclave. Scroll down past the introduction to read Rushdie’s speech.

Opening Up to the World and Its Evils

March 14, 2010 | Articles |

Letter from India, The International Herald Tribune

It was all bizarre — surreal, really. It was hard to imagine that this peaceful part of the country — a town without an airport or until recently even a broad-gauge rail connection, a sun-baked, slow-moving corner that has always felt at the edge of world — could really be on the map of global jihad.

Pondicherry’s charm has always lain for me in its isolation — its seclusion, its distance from the world, and the sense of perspective (and safety) afforded by that distance.

Yet the more I thought about it, the less surprising the apparent erosion of that safety seemed. After all, we’ve been subjected to wave after wave of globalization over the last couple of decades. I suppose terrorism is just the latest.

Evidence of Tolerance: Clashes Are Rare

February 26, 2010 | Articles |

Letter from India, The International Herald Tribune

I maintain my faith in India as a highly tolerant — if imperfectly so — country. I believe that the nation’s sporadic episodes of communal violence represent aberrations rather than the norm, inevitable clashes that are remarkable for the extent to which they are, indeed, sporadic.

When I consider the nation’s major outbreaks of communal violence since independence, I am struck by the fact that nearly each one was instigated by an act of political demagoguery. Politicians seeking votes have regularly fanned hatred and chauvinism. And as the Indian scholar Asghar Ali Engineer has pointed out, religious concerns are frequently a front for material interests. Riots between Hindus and Muslims are often thinly veiled property disputes or clashes over commercial interests.

India has a problem with communal violence. But it is not, and I believe never will be, a Beirut, a Yugoslavia or even a Northern Ireland. In a country as diverse and poor as India, the persistence of general communal harmony amid occasional outbreaks of disharmony suggests an essentially accommodating nation, one that is capable of living with and absorbing difference