Tharoor - India: from midnight to the millennium and beyond

Shashi Tharoor embarks on a journey from midnight to millennium, trying to find the answer to the paradox that is India, to discover the essence of the Indian identity, if there is one, and to test the truth of the prophecy of the British historian, E.P. Thompson, that describes India as the most important country for the future of the world. Indians will soon comprise one-sixth of the worlds population and therefore, the choices they will make are bound to resonate even in areas that they may not directly influence

Telegraph

Even as Tharoor forthrightly discusses the sectarian violence that has ripped through the country, the corruption that is rife in the ranks of the Indian administrative service, and the difficulties that face a nation in which 48 per cent of the population remains illiterate, he still writes with a certain optimism about the future

Business World

[Tharoors] engagement is with the conflicting vision of an imagined India in the diaspora. The book is an intervention in the ongoing fight between the overseas Indian Manhattan liberals and the overseas friends of the BJP

India Today

Tharoor has his own scheme of values and clear commitments. First, his commitment to democracy: with all its faults, democracy as it is practised in India is better than the alternatives. Next is his commitment to Indias pluralism, one of the main contributors to its special greatness as a nation, as a singular land of the plural. Then his commitment to secularism with its concomitant value of tolerance, and his opposition to religious fundamentalism

Frontline

Informed, insightful, seldom boring, often moving, this is a one-from-the-heart work where substance takes primacy over style. Tharoor writes feelingly and well, on issues as diverse as Indian socialism, secularism, job reservations, his childhood discovery of the schedule caste difference, Non Resident Indians including NRI/Italian-turned-Empress Regina: Sonia Gandhi nee Maino of Turino

Outlook

Whats fascinating is the way he weaves the past and the present, facts and legends and personal anecdotes and memories into a wonderful tapestry. The mirror he holds up neither distorts nor flatters. If it shows up the ugly warts, it also reflects the positive points

Business Standard

A work of remarkable depth

The Hindu

Few books in recent years, if any, offer such a comprehensive overview of India... Shashi Tharoor is a fluid and powerful writer, one of the best in a generation

New York Times Book Review

Hard-hitting, powerfully analytical and supremely articulate

Newsday

Tharoor is a thoughtful and well-informed observer... He writes elegantly and often colorfully... When he gets down to India as a concrete personal experience, everything seems new and fresh

New York Times

A literate and affecting panorama of the worlds largest democracy

Publishers Weekly

MAP

In loving memory of my father

C HANDRAN T HAROOR

(December 17, 1929-October 23, 1993)

who taught me to believe in

an India for Indians,

this book is dedicated

to my mother

L ILLY T HAROOR

It would not matter what kind of mess they madeand they would make a mess, if they governed themselves, the people of India. They would probably make the greatest muddle possible.

D. H. Lawrence, Aarons Rod

My legacy to India? Hopefully, it is 400 million people capable of governing themselves.

Jawaharlal Nehru

If there is one place on the face of the earth where all the dreams of living men have found a home from the earliest days when man began the dream of existence, it is India.

Romain Rolland