My first exposure to the travails of an Indian American’s return to roots was a semi-autobiographical film called Praying With Anger. It was a festival offering and ran once on a hot summer afternoon in Mumbai’s Regal cinema. This was the early 1990s, an era best described as without mobile phones, multiplexes and McDonalds. Most of my peers were still scrambling for US admissions while I debated whether opportunity lay on this side or the other. The film was a timely input.
Anand Giridharadas, the author of India Calling, An Intimate Portrait Of A Nation’s Remaking, embarked on this project a few years ago, much after Dev Raman, the protagonist of Praying with Anger, sought out his roots near Chennai. Dev was a pioneer of sorts, arriving here when most Indians in the US were still finding their feet there. While India in the 1990s was beginning to see the first rays of post-liberalisation hope, it wrestled with economic and social conditions that were the same as the previous decade.
Giridharadas grew up in Shaker Heights, Ohio, a mid-western town that most Americans would regard as remote. He, like many Indians in the US of that era, was a product of engineer-doctor parents. His father was an Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) graduate whose last India job was with the Tatas. His parents immersed themselves in American suburbia, complete with a red Oldsmobile. And they did not hesitate to take risks. In the author’s words, they “kept reinventing themselves, they allowed their ideas to be upset by better ones.” And they did not push the children, as other Indian parents did, to become engineers or doctors. So, the author had the liberty to choose his professions, including being a journalist/writer.
India tends to affix an identity on you, Giridharadas notes. His parents came from different parts of the country, his father was Tamilian and his mother Punjabi. The constant attempts to establish this in India amuses him. The relentless firing of questions till the “Ah” moment arrives — when that precise point on the X,Y and Z axis of geography, religion/race and economic status is established. And yet India was changing, he writes, “dramatically, viscerally and improbably.”
Interestingly, the author’s India yatra begins during his job with consulting firm McKinsey & Co. Interesting because the firm was aggressively attempting to shape the post-liberalisation landscape of India, by advising companies and governments on how to gear up for a competitive era. Giridharadas discovers life as every youngster knows it, through Mumbai paying guest (PG) digs, that unique institution. But unlike others, he uses this base to launch himself into the city, “making his forays into the Bombay throng, dissolved into the city’s layers of humanity.”
He soon swaps jobs, not unlike his parents, and becomes a journalist with the International Herald Tribune. No longer advising companies on change management, Giridharadas gets under the skin of the people driving it. He spends time with Reliance Industries Chairman Mukesh Ambani in Mumbai, including some enviable moments when they watch a cricket match together in an exclusive box. Like a good journalist, Giridharadas scoops fresh insights into Ambani’s youth, drive, life and style. He travels to Umred, near Nagpur to meet with Ravindra, an entrepreneur who mines a business opportunity in local Mr & Miss personality contests.
It’s in the telling of stories such as Ravindra’s that Giridharadas describes a gritty and penetrating journalism style that is rare to encounter and inspiring to read. Take his journey aboard the Pushpak Express with young migrants from Uttar Pradesh. The journeys begin in Lucknow and end years later as he follows them in their struggles in Mumbai. He tracks Deepak Kumar, whom he “met in third class without baggage and without a ticket,” over several months and years. And he concludes that the city is not kind to everyone. And not all ambitious youngsters take the honest route to success.
I liked the book for two reasons. First, because it is a refreshing post-Naipaulesque view of India. It begins with the frustrations of the past with which we are familiar with but races to a present with which we are still grappling. But a difficult past and the tumultuous present make India what it is. And very few writers, if at all, contextualise this well. Giridharadas has a chronological advantage of observing India, as a child who visited frequently, and experiencing it as a journalist and writer, an advantage he exploits well.
The second reason is that India Calling is a powerful journalistic account of India in motion and an intimate portrait of a nation in transition. It’s the kind of journalism that should be held up for young, deadline-chasing journalists trying to push stories in hours, if not minutes. India Calling’s strength is a perfect combination of excellent reportage and sharp insights into the new India, despite a few minor excesses in both departments. And hard work: Giridharadas embeds himself with his subjects over long periods of time in their natural environments and takes note of their happy and sad moments.
I’ve always wondered how Praying In Anger would have turned out were it to be made 20 years hence. The film ended badly as I saw it, highlighting cultural conflicts and chasms and leaving me confused about what lay on the other side. Incidentally, the film was directed by and starred Hollywood director Manoj N Shyamalam as Dev Raman. Possibly, the same film today would have gone the Giridharadas way in treatment. But it was Shyamalam’s maiden film and he then moved to making horror flicks. Giridharadas, hopefully, will stick to his calling.
INDIA CALLING
An intimate portrait of a nation’s remaking
Anand Giridharadas,
Fourth Estate, HarperCollins Publishers India, 2011
306 pages; Rs 499
