In Spite of the Gods. The Strange Rise of Modern India. By Edward Luce.
Don’t get intimidated by the title of the book. It is not a drab, technical documentary on Modern India. It’s almost like a travelogue, absorbing every feeling as you stick your head out of the train window on a tour de India.
Warning – This book is not for the faint hearted Indian who wants to deny the gripping poverty and corruption in India or wants to blame the western media for projecting only India’s wrong side of things. Its not for those who wrote innumerable articles about the ‘ The White tiger ‘ or ‘Slumdog Millionaire’, about how the book and the movie have been meant to titillate the western audience and show India in bad light. There is one diversion thought. Edward Luce, the British journalist, who headed the Financial Times bureau in New Delhi, knows what he is writing. The language is lucid; the facts come out through the numerous interviews he had carried out for the book and the tone extremely insightful, thought irreverent at parts.
What I like best about the book is that the author does not have an agenda. He is not writing the book to win any award, or to score any brownie point with any particular person. The only entity he wants to impress is India, and the many manifestations of this great nation, the cultural diversity, the religious fundamentalism, the tolerance, the yin and the yang (the book also contains a chapter on Indo – China relationship), the bureaucracy, the Nehru – Gandhi legacy, the minorities and the majorities, the modern and ancient, AIDS, the spiritual and the mundane, the slums and the economic liberalization, the bureaucracy and also people like Anura Roy who gave up the esteemed Indian Administrative Services to serve the poor and fight for the right to Information, the US reckless amoralism and the Indian foreign policy, caste system, dalits, the software industry, Bollywood and every thing else that crossed your mind about what makes India tick irrespective of everything that prima facie would signal her downfall.
