“Reading this book is like drowning in very, very shallow water”
I had hoped, while reviewing India Calling, to not make large and expansive statements about “such books”. But it seems I will fail. Partly because essentialising is a very contagious disease, and every page of India Calling is crawling with its icky germs, as also with those other brain-eating bacilli, Generalisation and Extrapolation. Partly because little in this particular book sets it apart from anything else in the genre, other than its quite unashamedly effusive blurbs. And partly because it is so extremely irritating a book that actually focusing on just it for very long hurts my head.
In tribute to Giridharadas’ inspiring method of thought, therefore, let me essentialise the way such authors, India’s irreplaceable interpreters to the world, go about things. First, there will be Grand Narratives and Startling Ideas. The young interpreter, especially if Indian-American, has known what they are since his cradle. He will empathise with the problems of these unfortunate left-behinds, but empathy does not breed the sort of humility that allows him to break new ground. Hence, the narratives will be of this type: poor Indians are now, for the first time, being allowed to dream. Or: young urban Indians are sleeping around, but they’re conflicted about it. Or: there’s a lot of new money sloshing around, but many people see none of it. There are precisely twelve such ideas — I shall not enumerate them, for fear of putting half of India’s publishers out of business — and all such books operate on some subset of them.
Mihir Sharma, “Anything to Declare”
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