Akash Kapur - India Becoming: A Portrait of Life in Modern India

PRAISE FOR INDIA BECOMING

This takes, wisely, a humble approach: instead of trying to encapsulate the entirety of Indias changes, it follows a few lives along the idiosyncratic ways they develop. For people who savored Katherine Boos Behind the Beautiful Forevers .

Evan Osnos, NewYorker.com

[A] lucid, balanced new bookKapur is determinedly fair-minded, neither an apologist nor a scold, and he is a wonderfully empathetic listener, willing patiently to visit and revisit a large cast of men and women over several years to learn how they are benefiting fromand being battered bythe change going on all around them.

The New York Times Book Review

Impressively lucid and searchingIn his clarity, sympathy, and impeccably sculpted prose, Kapur often summons the spirit of V. S. Naipaul.

Pico Iyer, Time

There are many virtues of Akash Kapurs beautifully sketched portrait of modern India. The book inhabits parts of India we do not explore often enough, the India of the south and of the transforming countryside. Mostly, it takes us into the minds and hearts of Indians seeking to adapt to a society changing at disconcerting speed. The book reads like a novelKapurs skill is to get people talking and to weave their stories into a necessarily messy debate about Indias future.

Financial Times

Readable, acutely observed, and crammed with well-drawn charactersKapurs strength is in letting his characters display the ambiguity that many feel about the ongoing change. Kapur offers a corrective to a simplistic new, happy narrative of a rising India.

The Economist

A gripping book [that] describes the dark side of the boomand the opportunities.

Der Spiegel

Kapur himself, with one leg in the East and one in the West, is an excellent ambassador to explain the dynamic of change in India, what the nation is becoming. Any reader who would like to understand the country better would do well to give him a read.

The Daily Beast

[Kapur] has a fluency that outsiderseven those of us who claim some genetic tielack.

The New Republic

A fascinating look at the transformation of India, with broader lessons on the upside and downside of progress.

Booklist (starred)

[A] lively, anecdotal look at the people who have been vastly changed by the entrepreneurial explosion in India. An honest, conflicted glimpse of a country.

Kirkus Reviews

This is a remarkably absorbing account of an India in transitionfull of challenges and contradictions, but also of expectations, hope, and ultimately optimism.

Amartya Sen

MarvelousKapur shows how the old rural cycle of the south Indian village depicted and romanticized by R. K. Narayan is fracturing and breaking apart to reveal a very new, more unstable world where the old certainties are disappearing and everything is up for grabs. Sharp-eyed, insightful, skillfully sketched and beautifully written, India Becoming is the remarkable debut of a distinctive new talent.

William Dalrymple, author of Nine Lives:
In Search of the Sacred in Modern India

Akash Kapur lives in and writes out of an India that few writers venture into. Curious, suspicious of received wisdom, and intellectually resourceful, [Kapur is] one of the most reliable observers of the New India.

Pankaj Mishra, author of Temptations of the West:
How to Be Modern in India, Pakistan, Tibet, and Beyond

Through a series of deft character sketches, Akash Kapur captures the contradictions of life in modern Indiabetween city and country, technology and aesthetics, development and the environment, greed and selflessness, individual fulfillment and community obligation. His writing is fresh and vivid; his perspective empathetic and appealingly nonjudgmental.

Ramachandra Guha, author of India After Gandhi

Beautifully writtenAkash Kapur celebrates the gains and mourns the losses, conveying a complex story through the ups and downs of the lives of some fascinating individual women and men.

Kwame Anthony Appiah, author of
Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers

India today is in the midst of profound change and Akash Kapur captures the impact of that change on the lives of ordinary Indians with a narrative that avoids all clichs, platitudes, and simplifications.

Gurcharan Das, author of India Unbound

India

Becoming

A Portrait of Life in Modern India

AKASH KAPUR

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NEW YORK

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Copyright 2012 by Akash Kapur

Cover design by Gabriele Wilson

Book design by Susan Walsh

Frontmatter map by Jeffrey L. Ward

Grateful acknowledgment is made to the Estate of Ryszard Kapuscinski
for the permission to reprint a quote from his work Szachinszach ( Shah of Shahs ),
copyright 1982 by Ryszard Kapuscinski.

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RIVERHEAD is a registered trademark of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

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First Riverhead hardcover edition: March 2012

First Riverhead trade paperback edition: March 2013

The Library of Congress has catalogued the Riverhead hardcover edition as follows:

Kapur, Akash.

India becoming : a portrait of life in modern India / Akash Kapur.

p. cm.

ISBN: 978-1-101-56099-0

1. IndiaEconomic conditions21 st century. 2. IndiaSocial conditions21 st century.
3. IndiaRural conditions. 4. Social conditionsIndia.

HC435.3.K36 2012 2011047588

330.954dc23

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In that spirit, we are proud to offer this book to our readers;
however the story, the experiences and the words are the authors alone.