India 101
One country, three perspectives. India explained by a Nobel Prize-winning economist, a CEO and a Pulitzer Prize finalist. All required reading for anyone remotely interested in India.
Amartya Sen. The Argumentative Indian. (New York: FSG, 2005.)
The Guru’s Guru. It just doesn’t get much better than this. No hot stock tips in here, just BIG ideas on history, culture and politics from a very big thinker. Don’t take this one to the beach. Read it as slowly as possible and absorb the wisdom of the master.
Gurcharan Das. India Unbound. (New York: Anchor Books, 2002.)
If you only have time for one book on India, this is it. Das, a former chief executive of Procter & Gamble India, “delivers the goods” as he likes to say, in this concise, yet detailed account of how Indian politicians blew it from 1947 to 1991 and have put the country back on the map since then. Like a great journalist, Das doesn’t tell us anything. He shows it to us, with detailed anecdotes from the bazaars to the corridors of India’s notorious bureaucracy and everywhere in between. As an executive, a consultant and an investor, Das has pretty much seen it all in India.
Btw, if you do only have time for one book on India, I suggest you rethink your reading list. You’ll have plenty of time to catch up on Harry Potter when your job gets oursourced to Hyderabad.
Suketu Mehta. Maximum City: Bombay Lost and Found. (New York: Vintage Books, 2004.)
I hate to call this ‘beach reading’ because it’s first-rate reporting and extremely well-written. You don’t get to the Pulitzer finals with anything less. It’s simply a spellbinding read. If you go to the beach with journalists or writer-types, however, I guarantee they will be very impressed when you pull this book out of your bag. Again, no stock tips in this one either or even all that much about the business world, but it is chock full of tales of life in one of the world’s wildest cities. Bollywood, gangsters, sex, money, violence…if nothing on that list piques your interest I don’t know what will.
