She spent five years in China, getting to know the country and its citizens. Smoke and Mirrors is the result of that experience. Among recent books on China (or China-India), Aiyar's stands out because it offers an Indian perspective on a country and people about which most Indians are deeply ambivalent, and also ill-informed.
Her first job there, however, was teaching English at the elite Beijing Broadcasting Institute. She was there during the SARS scare in 2002-2003, and in the extract below describes the reaction of her students to the changing pattern of news about the epidemic in the official media.
Rumours began to swish and swoop like malign giant birds, their flapping wings instilling fear. Scornful for so many weeks of the stories I had downloaded from the internet, the students now spent several hours a day monitoring news online. Forwarded text messages on their mobile phones became a major source of information, or misinformation, as was usually the case.
One of the more common rumours doing the rounds via mobile phones was that Beijing was about to be put under martial law, and all entry and exit points would be sealed off. Students began to flee the city returning en masse to their hometowns, despite a college regulation that ordered them to stay put.
The official media urged restraint and calm; the college radio began to broadcast soothing, synthesizer folk tunes instead of the usual brisk exercise music. The music provided the background to a recorded message that played all day on loop.
