The Indian Century?
Posted by Year of India on December 16, 2009
12/16/09: Radio Open Source host Chris Lydon, who spoke with authors Rana Dasgupta and Suketu Mehta while they were at Brown for the "New Indian Writing" literary festival, has written:
Are we missing the point about "India Rising" and "India Inc."? Two of India's best young writers descended on Brown University's Year of India last week. They are telling me in conversation here that (much as Prime Minister Singh's Sikh turban hid his snowy locks and the mind of a transformative capitalist) we're not getting the dread in the euphoria of India today, or the violence in the growth.
Suketu Mehta's Maximum City made him the Dickens of Bombay -- except that the mushroom megacities of India today are sprouting 20 times faster than 19th Century London.
Rana Dasgupta may be the Jonathan Safran Foer of New Delhi, hip and incisive writing fiction and fact in the land of his ancestors.
Among their many points, three to start: (1) We're sibling societies, still: transnations of rough entrepreneurial stock, formed around big constitutional ideas (not ethnicity or faith) in fights with the British over independence... (2) Indians know, use and adapt to America far better than we with them, and their advantage will tell more and more as Indians "spread out into Africa and China and central Asia with enormous ease and flexibility." And (3) a deep ping-pong game of ideas runs long and strong under the US-India connection: from Thoreau's ecstatic reading of the Bhagavad Gita to Gandhi's reading of Thoreau's Civil Disobedience, from Martin Luther King Jr.'s reading of Gandhi to Barack Obama's reading of Gandhi through King and his White House embrace of Prime Minister Singh last week.
Listen to Chris' interviews (available through the links above), and then post your comments here.
Comments (2)
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Posted by Janie Klein | January 29, 2010 05:10 PM