Travel

Anand Travels

anand travels India Calling:

India Calling: An Intimate Portrait of a Nation s Remaking

[A] smart, evocative and sharply observed memoir. Giridharadas’s narrative gusto makes the familiar fresh. —The Wall Street Journal

Anand Giridharadas sensed something was afoot as his plane from America prepared to land in Bombay. An elderly passenger looked at him and said, We re all trying to go that way, pointing to the rear. You, you re going this way? Giridharadas was returning to the land of his ancestors, amid an unlikely economic boom. But he was more interested in its cultural upheaval, as a new generation has sought to reconcile old traditions and customs with new ambitions and dreams.

November 28th, 2011 Panelists Tejbir Anand, Himmat Anand Abhinav Goel discuss market issues at the symposium. © Warren Brown 2011

anand travels

Reversing his parents immigrant path, a young American-born writer returns to India and discovers an old country making itself new

Anand Giridharadas sensed something was afoot as his plane from America prepared to land in Bombay. An elderly passenger looked at him and said, We re all trying to go that way, pointing to the rear. You, you re going this way?

Giridharadas was returning to the land of his ancestors, amid an unlikely economic boom. But he was interested less in its gold rush than in its cultural upheaval, as a new generation has sought to reconcile old traditions and customs with new ambitions and dreams.

In India Calling, Giridharadas brings to life the people and the dilemmas of India today, through the prism of his émigré family history and his childhood memories of India. He introduces us to entrepreneurs, radicals, industrialists, and religious seekers, but, most of all, to Indian families. He shows how parents and children, husbands and wives, cousins and siblings are reinventing relationships, bending the meaning of Indianness, and enduring the pangs of the old birthing the new.

Through their stories, and his own, he paints an intimate portrait of a country becoming modern while striving to remain itself.