India Becoming: A Portrait of Life in Modern India

218 Pages·2013·1.37 MB·English

by  Akash Kapur

PRAISE FOR INDIA BECOMING
“This takes, wisely, a humble approach: instead of trying to encapsulate the
entirety of India’s changes, it follows a few lives along the idiosyncratic ways
they develop. For people who savored Katherine Boo’s Behind the Beautiful
Forevers.”
—Evan Osnos, NewYorker.com
“[A] lucid, balanced new book…Kapur is determinedly fair-minded, neither an
apologist nor a scold, and he is a wonderfully empathetic listener, willing
patiently to visit and revisit a large cast of men and women over several years to
learn how they are benefiting from—and being battered by—the change going
on all around them.”
—The New York Times Book Review
“Impressively lucid and searching…In his clarity, sympathy, and impeccably
sculpted prose, Kapur often summons the spirit of V. S. Naipaul.”
—Pico Iyer, Time
“There are many virtues of Akash Kapur’s beautifully sketched portrait of
modern India…. The book inhabits parts of India we do not explore often
enough, the India of the south and of the transforming countryside. Mostly, it
takes us into the minds and hearts of Indians seeking to adapt to a society
changing at disconcerting speed. 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.”
—Financial Times
“Readable, acutely observed, and crammed with well-drawn characters…
Kapur’s strength is in letting his characters display the ambiguity that many feel
about the ongoing change…. Kapur offers a corrective to a simplistic ‘new,
happy narrative’ of a rising India.”
—The Economist
“A gripping book [that] describes the dark side of the boom—and the
opportunities.”
—Der Spiegel
“Kapur himself, with one leg in the East and one in the West, is an excellent
ambassador to explain the dynamic of change in India, what the nation is
becoming. Any reader who would like to understand the country better would do
well to give him a read.”
—The Daily Beast
“[Kapur] has a fluency that outsiders—even those of us who claim some genetic
tie—lack.”
—The New Republic
“A fascinating look at the transformation of India, with broader lessons on the
upside and downside of progress.”
—Booklist (starred)
“[A] lively, anecdotal look at the people who have been vastly changed by the
entrepreneurial explosion in India…. An honest, conflicted glimpse of a
country.”
—Kirkus Reviews
“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
“Marvelous…Kapur shows how the old rural cycle of the south Indian village
depicted and romanticized by R. K. Narayan is fracturing and breaking apart to
reveal a very new, more unstable world where the old certainties are
disappearing and everything is up for grabs. 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:
In Search of the Sacred in Modern India
“Akash Kapur lives in and writes out of an India that few writers venture into.
Curious, suspicious of received wisdom, and intellectually resourceful, [Kapur
is] one of the most reliable observers of the New India.”
—Pankaj Mishra, author of Temptations of the West:
How to Be Modern in India, Pakistan, Tibet, and Beyond
“Through a series of deft character sketches, Akash Kapur captures the
contradictions of life in modern India—between city and country, technology
and aesthetics, development and the environment, greed and selflessness,
individual fulfillment and community obligation. His writing is fresh and vivid;
his perspective empathetic and appealingly nonjudgmental.”
—Ramachandra Guha, author of India After Gandhi
“Beautifully written…Akash Kapur celebrates the gains and mourns the losses,
conveying a complex story through the ups and downs of the lives of some
fascinating individual women and men.”
—Kwame Anthony Appiah, author of
Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers
“India today is in the midst of profound change and Akash Kapur captures the
impact of that change on the lives of ordinary Indians with a narrative that
avoids all clichés, platitudes, and simplifications.”
—Gurcharan Das, author of India Unbound
India
Becoming
A Portrait of Life in Modern India
AKASH KAPUR
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Copyright © 2012 by Akash Kapur
Cover design by Gabriele Wilson
Book design by Susan Walsh
Frontmatter map by Jeffrey L. Ward
Grateful acknowledgment is made to the Estate of Ryszard Kapuscinski
for the permission to reprint a quote from his work Szachinszach (Shah of Shahs),
copyright © 1982 by Ryszard Kapuscinski.
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RIVERHEAD is a registered trademark of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.
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First Riverhead hardcover edition: March 2012
First Riverhead trade paperback edition: March 2013
The Library of Congress has catalogued the Riverhead hardcover edition as follows:
Kapur, Akash.
India becoming : a portrait of life in modern India / Akash Kapur.
p. cm.
ISBN: 978-1-101-56099-0
1. India—Economic conditions—21st century. 2. India—Social conditions—21st century.
3. India—Rural conditions. 4. Social conditions—India.
HC435.3.K36 2012 2011047588
330.954—dc23
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In that spirit, we are proud to offer this book to our readers;
however the story, the experiences and the words are the author’s alone.
ALWAYS LEARNING PEARSON
Auralice, Aman, Emil
History shows that where ethics and economics come in conflict, victory is
always with economics. Vested interests have never been known to have
willingly divested themselves.
—B. R. A
MBEDKAR
Development is a treacherous river, as everyone who plunges into its currents
knows. On the surface the water flows smoothly and quickly, but if the captain
makes one careless or thoughtless move he finds out how many whirlpools and
wide shoals the river contains.
—R K , S S
YSZARD APUŚCIŃSKI HAH OF HAHS
Life does not agree with philosophy.
—A
NTON CHEKHOV