'India Calling: An Intimate Portrait of a Nation's Remaking' by Anand Giridharadas

INDIA CALLING- An Intimate Portrait of a Nation’s Remaking by Anand Giridharadas
Published in the United States by Times Books, an imprint of Henry Holt and Company, in January, 2011. Order today from Amazon, Borders or Barnes & Noble. And available in India from HarperCollins and in Australia from Black Inc.

In India Calling, Anand 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.

Anand Giridharadas
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 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, Anand 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.

Anand Giridharadas - Biography

Anand Giridharadas is an author and columnist, writing about a world in transition. He is the author of “India Calling: An Intimate Portrait of a Nation’s Remaking,” about returning to the India his parents left. He writes the “Currents” column for The New York Times and its global edition, the International Herald Tribune, and also writes for The New York Times Magazine. He has reported from India, China, Norway, Haiti, Brazil, Colombia, Nigeria and the United States.

Born in Cleveland, Ohio, he was raised there, in Paris, France, and outside Washington, D.C., and educated at the University of Michigan, Oxford and Harvard. He is a former consultant for McKinsey & Company and later reported from Bombay for the Herald Tribune and The Times for four and a half years. He wrote about India’s transformation, Bollywood, corporate takeovers, terrorism, outsourcing, poverty and democracy. He was appointed a columnist in 2008, writing the “Letter from India”series before the “Currents” role.

He first interned for The New York Times at age 17, writing two articles on money and politics under the tutelage of Jill Abramson. He moved to Bombay after college, in 2003, to work as a consultant for McKinsey & Company, where he served on projects advising the local government on urban development, a pharmaceutical company on organizational redesign and leadership development, and Indian and Chinese businesses on their internationalization strategies.

He has appeared regularly on television and the radio in the United States and internationally, including on CNN, MSNBC, NPR, “The Daily Show” and other forums. He has lectured at Harvard, Stanford, the University of Michigan, the Sydney Opera House, the United Nations, the Asia Society, PopTech and Google. (To organize a talk, you can contact his speaking agent here.) He has been honored twice by the Society of Publishers in Asia for opinion and feature writing, by the South Asian Journalists Association for business reportage, and by the Indo-American Society for promoting cross-cultural understanding.

In 2011, he was named a Henry Crown fellow of the Aspen Institute.
www.http://anand.ly/