Sound Bite
When he called India a "functioning anarchy," economist Kenneth Galbraith may have been thinking about Uttar Pradesh (UP), in northern India.Some Indians laughingly refer to Uttar Pradesh as a "loser state." Known as a home of deep poverty, incurable corruption and sticky social problems, UP is not the India that now appears regularly in The New York Times and Newsweek. This is the "other" India; the one that modernity has largely left behind, and this book is a good-natured chronicle of Rick Connerney's repeated residencies over the last 18 years in that state.Most of India's 1.13 billion people live far from the call centers of Bangalore and Delhi and Westernized cities like Mumbai. A huge slice of humanity, 17.5% of the world's population, is practically invisible and impenetrable to most Americans. Exploring the realities of agriculture, business, the environment, politics, the economy, marriage, language and the arts, the author introduces the real people of India. At the heart of each chapter lies an epiphany about Indian culture ' Copernican intellectual shifts, radical reverses in the way the author made sense of the environment, when the evidence seemed to support one conclusion but further experience pointed to a different answer.
About the Book
India's future will be determined not only by economic development, but also by a dynamic traditional culture that continues to develop along its own lines ' sometimes in concert, and sometimes in conflict with material enrichment.India develops not, as one writer has suggested, 'in spite of the gods.' � Rather, the seed for the creation and the fuel for the sustenance of India�?'s economic boom lay in its traditions, and, I will argue, the animating spirit of its future lies there as well.I have neither the expertise nor the access to operate as a political correspondent, nor the desire to posture as a political pundit. During eighteen years of research, however, I have seen what I perceived as a pervasive misrepresentation of recent developments in Indian politics. More specifically, a number of recent books consistently paint the Hindu right wing in India as essentially fascist or theocratic. My observations show that these claims are untenable and misrepresent a positive development in the history of Indian democracy.To think clearly about the changes in today's India we require a new model: the bi-directional banyan tree, a symbol borrowed, ironically, from ancient Sanskrit verses. Pindar claimed, 'Custom is King of all,' and this serves as a succinct expression of the central thesis of this book.
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