Today's India
The Beautiful and the Damned
Life in New India
Siddhartha Deb
Penguin
Viking
The book -
Is a breezy read shaped in a non preachy tone -
Talks about multiple India’s and brings out the starkness –
the India and Bharat story is not just a press creation but a stark reality -
Shares author’s experiences and interactions at multiple locations with people from separate / unconnected backgrounds –
bringing it out as a widespread phenomenon -
Highlights how more and more of us know less and less of our
country – and care even less for / are oblivious to the India(s) other than one
in which we dwell -
Makes one question development and globalization - one wonders what people mean when they say development - and why so many people want it -
Interestingly jumps from page 27 to 71 – on account of
a case filed by The Indian Institute of Planning and Management – an issue the
band on the jacket conveys in bright colour -
Some snippets -
A society does not usually change direction with a sudden
jolt. It alters course in incremental amounts, running small, secret
simulations of experiments that achieve their full-scale elaboration only much
later. Its project of transformation contains repeats and echoes, and it is
always possible to trace earlier versions of an organization, a phenomenon, or
even a person.
‘India is a high-context society,’ he explained. ‘It is a
place where people interact with each other in many different ways. But in
America, people work on the basis of interest groups. People are together for a
reason, like work, and the interaction focuses on the reason for being
together. It doesn’t get deeper than that.
When complete, I found out later, Hotel Shangri-La would
include 469 rooms, 276 service apartments, and ‘a separate spa village complex
designed as a sanctuary within the hotel’, which meant that a fake village
would replace the real village that had existed there.
From the cities in which I had been spending so much of my
time, the Indian countryside felt like an afterthought, the remnant of an
ancient rural world finally being absorbed into modernity. It didn’t seem to
matter where I was – in Delhi, Calcutta, Bangalore or Hyderabad – everywhere
the metropolis was expanding, thrusting out the spokes of its highways and
throwing up office parks, apartment complexes and SEZs on what until recently
had been wetlands or agricultural plots.
The emphasis on such urban expansion conceals what might be
happening to Indian farmers, who are utterly absent from mainstream accounts of
progress.
And in a way, the encounter squad was a dream, surfacing from the deep regions of
the national subconscious where farmer suicides, Maoists and impoverished
workers swirled together to form the collateral damage of progress.
The truth was that India was being remade forcefully, and
some aspects of that remaking were more visible than others.
It was part of the Golden Quadrilateral project, a six-lane
band of modernity embracing the country, with only the occasional glitch of an
encounter squad to remind us of those left behind.
But as I heard these simple words – fever, dust, pain –
taking the place of any complicated diagnosis or description of symptoms, it
struck me that one of the characteristics of being higher up on the class
ladder was the specificity with which a person could speak of one’s ailments.
But there was another way of understanding the use of such simple words. The
workers didn’t have access to the kind of medical care that would let them
receive complex formulations of their illness.
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