Giridharadas avidly attests to the new sense of freedom gripping India.
Chronicle of how a brave new generation of Indians are re-engaging with the vastly altered land of their parents.
Raised near Cleveland, New York Times contributor Giridharadas worked in Bombay at the international management-consulting firm of McKinsey & Co., where his father was employed early on in America. In this fresh, clear-eyed account of his stay, the author writes eloquently of how he came upon a very different place from where his parents grew up. His father was a Tamil Brahmin who had made his way to America via higher education; his mother was a Punjabi who worked as a French translator. While the author and his sister grew up thoroughly Americanized in the suburbs, they were also keenly attuned to the Indian ways and occasionally visited the relatives in the Old Country. However, what distinguished his family from their counterparts in India was “their perpetual growth and self-renewal,” in contrast to the general stasis dictated by caste, heritage and profession. Yet mores were changing fast in India, and Giridharadas records what he saw in terms of the themes—dreams, ambition, pride, anger, love and freedom. He was struck by the new self-confidence in the country. “Indians didn’t need their émigrés anymore,” he writes. They were beginning to break caste and switch over to professions not practiced by their forebears. One example was Ravindra, a young man from the caste “tasked with crushing oil seeds,” who left his village to study English and eventually set up a thriving business offering roller-skating classes. The author looks at the changing manners of the Anglophiles, the class from which his parents emerged, and the new relativity of Indian moral reasoning, and he traces the “circus of money” that prevails in a society such as Hyderabad that now embraces acquisitiveness as vehemently as their parents’ had eschewed it. The author met many others determined to challenge the received ideas of their parents.
Giridharadas avidly attests to the new sense of freedom gripping India.Pub Date: Jan. 4, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-8050-9177-9
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Times/Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: Sept. 2, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2010
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.
“Quality of life means more than just consumption”: Two MIT economists urge that a smarter, more politically aware economics be brought to bear on social issues.
It’s no secret, write Banerjee and Duflo (co-authors: Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way To Fight Global Poverty, 2011), that “we seem to have fallen on hard times.” Immigration, trade, inequality, and taxation problems present themselves daily, and they seem to be intractable. Economics can be put to use in figuring out these big-issue questions. Data can be adduced, for example, to answer the question of whether immigration tends to suppress wages. The answer: “There is no evidence low-skilled migration to rich countries drives wage and employment down for the natives.” In fact, it opens up opportunities for those natives by freeing them to look for better work. The problem becomes thornier when it comes to the matter of free trade; as the authors observe, “left-behind people live in left-behind places,” which explains why regional poverty descended on Appalachia when so many manufacturing jobs left for China in the age of globalism, leaving behind not just left-behind people but also people ripe for exploitation by nationalist politicians. The authors add, interestingly, that the same thing occurred in parts of Germany, Spain, and Norway that fell victim to the “China shock.” In what they call a “slightly technical aside,” they build a case for addressing trade issues not with trade wars but with consumption taxes: “It makes no sense to ask agricultural workers to lose their jobs just so steelworkers can keep theirs, which is what tariffs accomplish.” Policymakers might want to consider such counsel, especially when it is coupled with the observation that free trade benefits workers in poor countries but punishes workers in rich ones.
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.Pub Date: Nov. 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-61039-950-0
Page Count: 432
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: Aug. 28, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019
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