India Becoming , livre ebook

AKASH KAPUR
India Becoming
A Journey Through a Changing Landscape
Contents
About the Author
Praise for the Book
Dedication
Map
Prologue
PART I
Golden Times
Demographic Dividends
The Shandy
Garden City
A Drowning
PART II
Blindness
Goondagiri
Dioxins
Hard Times
Reality
Epilogue
Acknowledgements
Follow Penguin
Copyright Page
PENGUIN BOOKS
INDIA BECOMING
Akash Kapur has written for various publications, including The Economist, the New Yorker, the New York Times, Granta, the Statesman (New Delhi) and Outlook . He is the former ‘Letter from India’ columnist for the International Herald Tribune . This is his first book.
Akash holds a BA in social anthropology from Harvard University and a doctorate in law from Oxford University, which he attended as a Rhodes Scholar.
Akash lives with his wife and two children outside Pondicherry, where he also grew up.
To know more, visit his site at www.akashkapur.com.
Praise for the Book
‘Lucid, balanced … Kapur is especially qualified to assess the contrasts and contradictions that change has brought … 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.’— New York Times Book Review
‘Impressively lucid and searching … When he trains his zoom lens on individuals caught in the country’s million mutinies [Kapur] reveals the subtler challenges that have accompanied economic gain. In his clarity, sympathy and impeccably sculpted prose, Kapur often summons the spirit of V.S. Naipaul.’—Pico Iyer, Time
‘[R]eadable, acutely observed and crammed with well-drawn characters … Mr Kapur offers a corrective to a simplistic “new, happy narrative” of a rising India. That is welcome and he does it well.’— The Economist
‘There are many virtues of Akash Kapur’s beautifully sketched portrait of modern India. 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
‘A gripping book [that] describes the dark side of the boom—and the opportunities.’— Der Spiegel
‘A fascinating look at the transformation of India, with broader lessons on the upside and downside of progress.’— Booklist (starred review)
‘Kapur focuses on recounting the stories of a wide range of characters he encountered during his research. Their stories are what give the book its texture and insight, and make it a valuable investigation of the effects of India’s fast-paced change on the land and its people.’— Publishers Weekly
‘Lively, anecdotal look at the people who have been vastly changed by the entrepreneurial explosion in India … An honest, conflicted glimpse of a country still sorting through the contradictions of a rapid, and inevitably messy, transformation.’— Kirkus Reviews
‘[Kapur] has a fluency that outsiders—even those of us who claim some genetic tie—lack … Kapur’s writing is deceptively simple. He hardly ever draws attention to himself, and he does not insert himself into his interviews. He listens and asks a few—not leading—questions. He is patient, and he gains his subjects’ trust.’— New Republic
‘Kapur … 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 (a ‘Nonfiction Must Read’)
‘The book reads like a novel. Kapur [is] a writer in the tradition of literary journalism. There are some beautifully rendered passages … Kapur is at his best when conveying the beauty of rural India.’— Toronto Standard
‘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
‘There have been many books now on the new India, but almost all of them concentrate on urban North India. Akash Kapur’s marvellous book is unique in looking mainly at the South and in a detailed and intimate way at village life. He shows how the old rural world depicted and romanticized by R.K. Narayan is fracturing and breaking apart to reveal a very new, more unstable world. Sharpeyed, insightful, skilfully sketched and beautifully written, India Becoming is the remarkable debut of a distinctive new talent.’— William Dalrymple
‘Akash Kapur lives in and writes out of an India that few writers venture into. Curious, suspicious of received wisdom, and intellectually resourceful, his writing has established him as one of the most reliable observers of the New India.’— Pankaj Mishra
‘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 fulfilment and community obligation. His writing is fresh and vivid; his perspective empathetic and appealingly non-judgemental.’— Ramachandra Guha
‘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
‘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
‘Akash Kapur is a wonderful writer: a courageously clear-eyed observer, an astute listener, a masterful portraitist, and a gripping storyteller.’— Philip Gourevitch
‘Akash Kapur invites us to explore a country collapsing with contradictions. I have never been to India, but after reading Kapur’s fascinating and absorbing book I almost feel as if I have.’— David Lida
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. Ambedkar
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.
-Ryszard Kapuscinski, Shah of Shahs
Life does not agree with philosophy.
-Anton Chekhov
The international boundaries on the maps of India are neither purported to be correct nor authentic by Survey of India directives.
Prologue
The East Coast Road has changed. Twenty-five years ago, when I was a child growing up at its edge, it was a potholed tar road that meandered across the South Indian countryside, cutting through rice fields and coconut plantations and sleepy fishing villages. The views were stunning-a rippled ocean, the grey waters of the Bay of Bengal, shimmering under the harsh coastal sun.
Sometime in the 1990s, government contractors descended upon the road. They surveyed neighbouring fields and farms, they bulldozed surrounding huts. Villages were cut in half, families were uprooted. Hundreds of ancient trees were brought down. Activists protested, but they were told the social and ecological disruption was the price of progress.
By the time I moved back to India, in the winter of 2003, after more than a decade in America, the country road I knew as a child had become a 160-kilometre highway. Politicians extolled it as a model for modern India-an ambitious collaboration between government and private companies, the kind of infrastructure the country needed to develop its economy.
The surface of the East Coast Road is now a smooth mix of tar and powdered rock. The road is adorned with dividers that glow in the dark, signs for emergency services and toll counters that light up the night with their halogen lamps and bright metal booths. Some of the rice fields remain, and the views are still beautiful. But much of the countryside has given way to the promised development-beach resorts, open-air restaurants, movie theatres and scores of small tea shops catering to the tourists that throng the road on weekends.

At the top of the East Coast Road, outside the city of Chennai, tourist attractions lead into urban congestion. Traffic is denser, the crowds swell off the sidewalks and on to the streets, and the ocean breeze is obstructed by tightly packed shops and office buildings.
The East Coast Road joins Rajiv Gandhi Salai, Chennai s technology corridor. The change here is even more striking. Twenty-five years ago, Rajiv Gandhi Salai was itself a country road, a little-used path that carried tourists from Chennai to the seaside town of Mahabalipuram. Like the East Coast Road, it was bordered by farms and plantations; well into the 90s, when the software and outsourcing companies began setting up shop, you could see the occasional tractor, maybe even a bullock cart, on the road.
Today, Rajiv Gandhi Salai, also referred to as the Old Mahabalipuram Road-as if to distance it from the present, to demarcate it as a relic from a different moment in the nation s history-is a showcase of the new India. The farmland has become fertile terrain for steel-framed and glass-panelled office buildings. These buildings house the technology companies driving India s economic boom-the Yahoo!s and PayPals and Verizons that have rushed into the country over the last couple of decades, but also local upstarts like Infosys, Satyam and Wipro that have for the first time put India on the map of global business.
Employees of these companies-men in tightly tucked shirts and khakis, women more likely to be dressed in pants than saris-swarm to work in the mornings, jamming the highway with their motorcycles and scooters. At noon, they break for lunch on well-maintained gardens, expansive l