India Calling: An Intimate Portrait of a Nation's Remaking
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About this ebook
Reversing his parents' immigrant path, a young American-born writer returns to India and discovers an old country making itself new
Anand Giridharadas sensed something was afoot as his plane from America prepared to land in Bombay. An elderly passenger looked at him and said, "We're all trying to go that way," pointing to the rear. "You, you're going this way?"
Giridharadas was returning to the land of his ancestors, amid an unlikely economic boom. But he was interested less in its gold rush than in its cultural upheaval, as a new generation has sought to reconcile old traditions and customs with new ambitions and dreams.
In India Calling, Giridharadas brings to life the people and the dilemmas of India today, through the prism of his émigré family history and his childhood memories of India. He introduces us to entrepreneurs, radicals, industrialists, and religious seekers, but, most of all, to Indian families. He shows how parents and children, husbands and wives, cousins and siblings are reinventing relationships, bending the meaning of Indianness, and enduring the pangs of the old birthing the new.
Through their stories, and his own, he paints an intimate portrait of a country becoming modern while striving to remain itself.
Anand Giridharadas
Anand Giridharadas writes the “Currents” column for the International Herald Tribune and The New York Times online. He is the author of India Calling: An Intimate Portrait of a Nation's Remaking. A native of Cleveland, Ohio, and a graduate of the University of Michigan, he worked in Bombay as a management consultant until 2005, when he began reporting from that city for the Herald Tribune and the Times. He now lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
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Reviews for India Calling
22 ratings6 reviews
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Really enjoyed this book. Referring to an Indian girl who had moved to England to escape the confines of her Indian family he writes: 'In England...she not only found a boyfriend and not only moved in with him, but also managed to find one who was a Pakistani Muslim. Her parents did not know, and it was assumed they would go into simultaneous cardiac arrest if they ever found out' Writing about attending a party to celebrate a visit home by the above mentioned girl: 'The men seemed more than shy; they appeared to be entirely incapable of contemplating what it would involve
to dance with a woman who was not their mother. It seemed likely that they would follow the traditional pattern of having no contact with a woman until the day when they would gain the legal right to force themselves on one. As one often observed at large gatherings of Indian males, they tended to make lusty eyes at one another instead. A man named Hemant, not long after being introduced to me for the first time, dragged me across the room and into the male dancing circle. He stood before me and began to pump his hips and thrust his hands into the air, with every expectation that I do the same, which very, very tepidly, I did' - Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The True American feels padded and it meanders a bit, especially at the end. But the story of how a victim sought to prevent the execution of a man who nearly killed him is pretty gripping, and I thought that the author did a marvelous job of treating both victim and perpetrator as real people rather than archetypes.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5I missed this nonfiction book when it came out last May, and was astonished that I haven’t heard any chatter about it. The book probes the 2001 murders of two South Asian men and the attempted murder of a third because they “looked Muslim” to the assailant, a “Texas loud, Texas proud” man named Mark Stroman, who viewed his actions as revenge for 9/11. The story is told from the points of view of Stroman and the critically injured Bangladeshi man, Rais Bhuiyan, “two men bound, as it turned out, by more than just an act of violence,” said Ayad Akhtar in the New York Times.Over the course of the trial and the long wait on Texas’s death row (the death penalty applied because one of the murders occurred in the course of another crime, a robbery), the victim, Bhuiyan, comes to believe Allah saved him from death so that he could do something remarkable. That something, he decided, was to forgive Mark Stroman. Not only to forgive, but to save him from execution. The lengthy interviews journalist Giridharadas conducted give unparalleled access to the thinking of both Bhuiyan and Stroman, however tangled and inconsistent it may be. Bhuiyan, who would appear to hold all the moral high ground here, at times gets caught up in the self-promotional aspects of his international justice campaign. Meanwhile, Stroman cannot be simply dismissed as another gun-toting nut, either. He has been let down in many ways by people and institutions that should have served him better; in his time on death row, he learns to admore Bhuiyan and to think more deeply about his actions—or at least to mouth the words. The author comes to no simplistic conclusions about these possibly imperfect motives on either side. As Akhtar says, “Giridharadas seeks less to uplift than illuminate.” And, Anne-Marie Slaughter says the book “explores two sharply opposed dimensions of the American experience in a style that neither celebrates nor condemns. We readers become the jury, weighing what it means to be a true American today.”
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5If this book were fiction, it could easily be deemed "unrealistic". The lives of two very different men are forever intertwined due to an act of violence which changes the future of each man. Following 9/11 Mark Stroman takes it upon himself to avenge the deaths of Americans by killing Arabs. After two murders of convenience store clerks, he shoots Rais Bhuiyan in the face. Bhuiyan is from Bangladesh; none of his victims are Arabs.Following that act of violence, the author retraces the lives of both men. Stroman, born into a dysfunctional loosely- knit family, has a record of trouble from early days in school. Bhuiyan was raised in a tightly knit Muslim family and served as a disciplined pilot in the Bangladesh Air Force. He comes to American to pursue what he understands to be the American dream. Their past and their future prospects couldn't be further apart.The author retells the events of the murder, the trial, and the path both men follow to find redemption. Believing he owes God for saving his life, Bhuiyan eventually overcomes anger and disappointment and forgives Stroman and works to appeal his death sentence. Due to several encounters with others in prison and the forgiveness of Bhuiyan, Stroman comes to believe that his death sentence is actually a "life saving" event as he finds a sense of peace. This is a book about faith and religion, poverty and ambition, culture and politics, and a view of American values from the viewpoint of an immigrant and a man who believes himself to be the "true American." The final chapters given an insightful view of generational poverty, dysfunction, and lack of direction. Although the events in the book are complicated, the book is extremely readable and griping and provides plenty of food for thought.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5(Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com]. I am the original author of this essay, as well as the owner of CCLaP; it is not being reprinted illegally.)Regular readers know that in the last several years, I've been giving myself a crash course of sorts all about the regions we in the West refer to as the Middle East and Southeast Asia, mostly because these areas are becoming more and more important by the day in world affairs, and like most Americans I don't know the least little freaking thing about any of them; but unfortunately, I've learned that most of the contemporary books coming out these days that purport to teach us Westerners more about these regions usually fail at one extreme or another, being either overly simplistic book-length Wikipedia entries that teach nothing about what it's like to actually live there right now, or glorified doctoral theses with a mainstream-friendly cover slapped on the front, full of obscure political theories and lots of demographic data but failing to give the reader a good overall look at the area. But not so with India Calling, an almost perfect balance of these elements by Anand Giridharadas, accomplished mostly by the circumstances of him being a youngish intellectual Indian-American who wished and then got a long-term job with the New York Times to cover the subcontinent, moving there permanently after an American childhood filled with old stories and frequent vacations, which allows him not only to be an outsider and insider at once, but also to simultaneously understand the culture and history behind all the 21st century "quiet revolutions" going on there right now and still be surprised and somewhat awestruck by it all as well.And of course, it helps quite a bit that Giridharadas's job as a journalist specifically sends him into a whole variety of fascinating situations on a regular basis, where he uses his keen intellect to not only report on what he sees but interpret to Americans why it's so important; and so from his time spent with a former "untouchable" who has entrepreneurially transformed himself into a laptop-owning middle-class motivational speaker, to a day at a rural and largely improvised "family court" system, to his talk with one of the richest and most powerful media moguls in the country, Giridharadas brings a mesmerizing sense of place and society to each of the strange little things he examines, giving us perhaps the best overall "insider's" view of Indian life in the 21st century that English speakers have now seen. A huge recommendation whether or not you're specifically interested in India itself, precisely because you will be after finishing no matter what your attitude was before, India Calling absolutely makes me want to now seek out Giridharadas's newspaper columns on a more timely basis, in the same kind of exhilarated way that I felt about Malcolm Gladwell after reading The Tipping Point.Out of 10: 9.4
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Interesting story of 1st generation American going back to India as an adult. Author compares and contrasts his childhood and his parents memories and how those memories intersect with "modern" India. Almost a cultural anthropologgical look at the India that is moving into the 21st century with the India of less than 50 years ago. Interesting read with personal stories interspersed with with the juxtaposition of a culture in the throes of change.