Wednesday, October 19th, 2011
I still own some of the Tintins that my father used to read to me when I was a boy. I grew up on the exploits of this intrepid and mysterious (because we know so little about his private life) reporter. I find myself laughing at Calculus or Jolyon Wagg or the Thompson twins as hard today as I did thirty years ago. Few things give me as much pleasure in life as reading Tintin to my two boys every night before they go to sleep.
So it is with some trepidation (but tremendous excitement) that I intend to go see Spielberg’s “The Adventures of Tintin: The Secret of the Unicorn” this winter. My trepidation is heightened by the contradictory reviews I’ve been reading–some glowing, others scathing. I plan to take my boys–but I hope that the Hollywoodization of these comics won’t spoil the sense of innocence and purity that I (and I think they) still attach to these books.
In the meantime, for those less ambivalent about the whole thing, here’s a brilliant preview. And, for Indian readers, did you know that Tintin has now been launched in Hindi?
Monday, October 10th, 2011
Great, in-depth political reporting. An excellent profile of Manmohan Singh and his government, from Vinod Jose in Caravan Magazine. You rarely get to read such behind-the-scenes political reporting in India. His account of the discussions and debates within the government during the summer of 1991 is particularly interesting. It would be great to see a whole book on that fateful summer–a kind of Bob Woodwardian analysis of the key players (and their compunctions and interests) who so radically remade India.
Monday, October 10th, 2011
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.
Tuesday, October 4th, 2011
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.
Tuesday, October 4th, 2011
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.”
Thursday, September 15th, 2011
Oh, I like this: now the developing world is going to bail Europe out. German taxpayers feel resentful about bailing out their fellow-Europeans, so it’s upto Indian and Brazilian taxpayers. (But of course, try applying for a visa to these countries as a BRIC member….)
Wednesday, September 14th, 2011
The NYT launches its very fine India blog, India Ink. I still remember the days when I had to beg American editors to let me write about India. They were convinced the country wasn’t relevant and, as one editor told me, “didn’t fit into any American narrative.” I guess a little capitalism and lots of new money changed that.
Wednesday, July 20th, 2011
Ram Guha’s very fine piece in the FT on corruption in India really sets out the scale of the problem, and the stakes involved.
A great–if depressing–conclusion: “[India] is not a rising power, nor even an emerging power. It is merely a fascinating, complex, and perhaps unique experiment in nationhood and democracy, whose leaders need still to attend to the fault lines within, rather than presume to take on the world without.”
Tuesday, July 5th, 2011
What an essay from the NYTBR! One of the more inventive and imaginative pieces I’ve read in a while. Great reading for anyone interested in tennis and literature. Make sure also to follow the link to the David Foster Wallace (”the Federer of tennis writing”) piece he discusses: Federer as Religious Experience. A true classic.
Sunday, July 3rd, 2011
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.
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