Kapur grew up and now lives in the countryside outside Puducherry. "India Becoming: A Journey through a Changing Landscape" is the result of his effort to understand the changing landscape of India, transformed by rapid economic growth, which he first encountered on his return from the US in 2003.
"I grew up in the countryside outside Pondicherry, so the villages and small towns of India, and especially South India, was the landscape that I knew best. I also knew that it was a landscape generally under-represented in contemporary writing about India," he says.
"But really, the main reason I wanted to write about small towns is because I felt like I understood that world, and because I felt like the process of transformation playing out in India was particularly complex and nuanced in that world," Kapur told PTI.
He says the title "India Becoming" captures the "sense of a nation that is still undergoing a process of transition - a nation on the move, becoming something, but we don't know yet just what".
According to the writer, the key and only indisputable fact of modern India is that it is a nation undergoing a dramatic process of change.
"That change is still playing out; we have by no means reached an end point yet."
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While writing the book, Kapur followed the lives of the characters for several years almost feeling like a journalist.
"I think it's important for writers to have a life outside the writing - to do other things, to engage with the world in other ways. Otherwise, what will we write about? We have to know the world in order to write about it."
He chose the characters of "India Becoming" through a process of serendipity.
"There wasn't much of a system. I wasn't so much seeking to find characters who could be demographically representative of India. I was looking for characters whose lives embodied the nation