New book by NRI entrepreneur explores colonial rule in India

A new book by a top NRI entrepreneur here about the British rule and its role in creating a unified India has attracted rave reviews for bringing out the "many positive aspects" of the colonial rule that remained hitherto untold.
Kartar Lalvani, a philanthropist, private scholar and historian, in the preface of his book, 'The Making of India: The Untold Story of British Enterprise', writes: "Given the wealth of valuable original information that I found waiting to be uncovered during my research, it is surprising that the many positive aspects of colonial rule have remained hitherto untold."
"As British Indian, it gives me great pride to give due recognition to the positive side of the imperial coin, which I discovered in a single volume of 432 pages," he says further.

Born in Karachi in 1931, Kartar moved to Mumbai in 1947 after partition and to London in 1956 to study pharmacy at Chelsea, before undertaking his doctorate with distinction at the University of Bonn. He is founder-chairman of Vitabiotics.
He says he envisaged the book to detail "how this great British enterprise and its contributions in the 19th and 20th centuries helped to create a unified India, out of multi-cultural, multi-linguistic and divided regions of the vast Indian-subcontinent."
Commenting on the book, Blair called it "absolutely excellent: informative, well argued and passionate. This book contains the seeds of future Anglo-Indian cooperation."

In his Foreword to the book, former Union Minister and Rajya Sabha member Ram Jethmalani, said "I fully concur with Dr Lalvani that Indians should be grateful for some of the permanent blessings of colonial rule, which only the unique attributes of the British could have conferred on us. A highly educated author belonging to the brave Sikh community should declare the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth."

In the book, Lalvani presents the first exploration of Britain's colonial contribution to the nation's building in a single volume.
From the iron girders, tools and workers that made the treacherous 19,200 kmvoyage, to the tea, spices, silk and cotton that returned home, this book assesses those first ground-breaking endeavours and the two centuries of British imperial rule that followed.

'The Making of India' explores how the first pioneers used girders for more than 100,000 bridges, track for 73,000kmof railway and countless pieces of heavy machinery to begin physically building the world's largest democracy.
The book quotes former Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, when he in his 2005 speech at Oxford University said: "Today, with the balance and perspectiveoffered by the passage of time and the benefit of hindsight, it is possible for an Indian Prime Minister to assert that India's experience with Britain had its beneficial consequences too."
It also quotes UK Prime Minister David Cameron stating in 2013 that "there is an enormous amount to be proud of in what the British Empire did.... There were bad events as well as good events and the bad events we should learn from and the good events we should celebrate.