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About the author:

Anand Giridharadas, is an American writer and newspaper columnist. He also serves as an analyst for CNN and CBC Radio. Born in Shaker Heights, Ohio, Giridharadas has since resided in Cleveland, Paris and Maryland. He studied the history of political thought at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor and at St. Edmund Hall, Oxford. After college, he moved to Mumbai in 2003, where he worked as a consultant for the global management consulting firm McKinsey & Company. He has written pieces for the International Herald Tribune and The New York Times. In 2008 he was promoted to columnist at The New York Times. In addition, he serves as an active lecturer, panelist and moderator at universities, the United Nations and private companies. In 2011, he released his first book ”India Calling: An Intimate Portrait of a Nation's Remaking.”

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: An Intimate Portrait of a Nation’s Remaking,” 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.

[pic]Credit: Darshan Photography