• 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).

Behind the Digital Divide

Thursday, March 10th, 2005
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What do people on the ground really think of the digital divide? A ground-up view, published in The Economist.

The Third “R”

Monday, January 17th, 2005
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What happens after the waters recede? A second report on the tsunami, published in The New Yorker

Tsunami

Monday, January 10th, 2005
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A dispatch on the tsunami, published in The New Yorker
No one who survived the tsunami that crashed into South India on December 26th describes it as a wave. The fishermen and villagers who live along the coast, and whose homes and livelihoods were swept away, speak of a “wall of water.”

‘Maximum City’: Bombay Confidential

Sunday, November 21st, 2004
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Review of Maximum City, by Suketu Mehta, The New York Times Book Review

Election Time in the World’s Largest Democracy

Friday, May 14th, 2004
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Five Dispatches on India’s national elections and their surprising outcome, published in Slate

Beyond the Digital Divide

Thursday, March 11th, 2004
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An article on new business models that seek to bridge the digital divide with for-profit solutions. Published in The Economist

The Present Is a Foreign Country

Sunday, February 23rd, 2003
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Review of Heaven’s Edge, by Romesh Gunesekera, The New York Times Book Review

House of Blue Mangoes

Sunday, March 31st, 2002
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Review of The House of Blue Mangoes, by David Davidar, The New York Times Book Review

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.

Politics Into Economics Don’t Go

Monday, July 16th, 2001
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An essay on the literature of immigrants, published in Index on Censorship
The end of the Cold War altered political realities; it also changed the way the West receives–and reads–immigrants