India through a wide-angle lens

It is not easy being a foreigner in India, for there are a multitude of Indias to fathom.

And for a foreigner journalist it is even harder, because you have to constantly attempt to make sense of what is around you for an audience to give them, in Daniel Lak's words, "a single thread that ties together all we've seen and experienced".

His book is a collection of writing done while covering India, and he states upfront that it is an attempt to go beyond conventional ways of "thinking about India", which are "along predictable, cliched lines".

"Foreign scholars seem mostly concerned with distant history," he writes in the book's introduction, "non-Indian journalists with a tumultuous but often ill-interpreted present, a succession of disasters, dreadful violence or political failures."

He states his objectives thus: "I want this book""in a somewhat meandering and anecdotal way""to be an attempt to show that all of these points of view neglect one crucial thing about India: the constant and prolonged state of social and economic ferment that is forever changing the face of Indian society."

This is a banal observation"" that "ferment" is already the stuff of cliche. But Lak does himself, and his book, a disservice by stating it thus.

Firstly, his book does not meander""it is not one single narrative but a collection of interesting journalistic features.

Secondly, the content of the book is not as trite as the stated objective. Lak examines familiar faces of India with a fresh and unjaundiced eye, with the curiosity of a foreigner and the rigour of a top-flight journalist.

Even for Indians, perhaps especially for Indians, the book holds revelations.

The book is a collection of snapshots of India, taken with a lucid eye and a wide-angle lens.

It is also a series of encounters with people, who are his window to the country. The cross-section of people he meets are a reflection of the diversity of this book.

From India's biggest IT entrepreneur to a rat-catcher, from its chief demographer to an anonymous lesbian couple, from a sexologist to AIDS widows and women whose husbands were carried away by crocodiles and togers, Lak does them all.

But there are two things to note here. One, he does not exoticise, as so many foreigners are prone to doing. Two, he treats them with equal respect.

One of the methods that serves Lak, and his readers, well is letting the characters speak for themselves. There are long passages of narrative in which Lak is just the recorder of a voice, a story, and we hear a lot of the book through his characters.

We hear Ashish Bose, India's chief demographer, talk about the "prosperous backwardness" of Haryana, of how tractors are often bought by farmers not because they make business sense but for aspirational reasons, and are a major cause of debt in the region.

We hear Narayana Murthy sum up his philosophy thus: "You don't end poverty by redistributing limited wealth, you help the poor by creating more and more wealth."

(And moments later, you hear him bark at a telephone caller about a sacked employee.) You hear Pradeep Kar describe the liberalisation of 1991 as "our French and American revolutions".

It isn't just the rich and famous Lak talks to. A taxi driver whose brother died of AIDS says to Lak, "I stopped going to the same brothel as he."

A widow whose husband gave her the HIV virus before dying speaks of how he picked it up from prostitutes in another country, and says, with understanding, "Men have their needs."

An incest victim recounts how her mother slapped her after she complained about her brother-in-law licking her cheeks.

"That hurt me so much more than that disgusting tongue on the cheek."

Lak is sceptical but never cynical, always enquiring yet always sympathetic. The high point of the book comes towards the middle, when in a series of outstanding pithy chapters, Lak turns his eye towards aspects of India that Indians are often in denial of.

Our sexuality; homosexuality, especially among women; the incest in our society; the pollution of the Ganga, which so many non-urban non-elites still think of simplistically as a purifying force; and, worst of all, AIDS.

Lak does not moralise or stand on judgement on any of these issues, but nor does he mince his words or resort to euphemisms.

He tells it as he sees it, and that makes Mantras of Change a book worth reading if you're interested in India. Regardless of your nationality.

Mantras of Change
Reporting India in a Time of Flux

Daniel Lak
Penguin Books India
Price: Rs 375,
Pages: 272