Aseem ShrivastavaCritiques

This is an excellent read. I really like the manner they started the book, by comparing the changes taking place in India to the old mythological story of the churning of the oceans to get Amrit. While the Gods and Demons were equal partners in the task, the Gods deceived the Demons to get the nectar of immortality. So, nothing is as clear as it seems to be.

India is churning, and is changing. There is much that seems good, and when you scratch the surface, then you find that there are problems that come to the surface. Yet, there is much good that is happening in India, and this is not easily seen in today's sensational approach to talking about the troubles that India is facing.

There is a lot of information in this book that came as a surprise to me, and many modern day myths have been busted - at least, for me. Yes, India's globalization has benefited only a small section of the population. This is something that is visible to me, as is the change in the attitude of India's elite. India's problems are many, and many more problems have been revealed in the book, that I ever knew about. This takes up 2/3 of the book, and 1/3 or less, is devoted to recommending solutions. This second part is the weaker part of the book, and while these solutions are good, the authors could have applied the same rigor to this second part of the book; the same rigor that they applied to exposing the problems. It seems to me that they glossed over the second part of the book, and this is a tragedy. I hope that they come up with a second version of the book, one where there is more academic rigor to the second , very crucial part.