Portrait of a nation

Lead Review

Bewildering changes in India during the last two decades following liberalisation have prompted the rich and powerful to sell the nation as an economic superpower.

They want market to be the final arbiter. But the image of a shining India driven by technology, as promoted by the corporate media, often conceals the unpalatable reality.

While creating more billionaires, globalisation has widened inequality and aggravated agrarian crisis, driving more and more people to destitution.

It is this sweeping change that inspired New York-based writer Siddhartha Deb to explore new India. The Beautiful and the Damned: Life in the New India is a portrait of a nation in transition. The India story is narrated through the stories of its people, the rich and the wretched. They are the people he met while criss-crossing the vast expanse, investigating the changes he found when he returned after six years in the US.

He lets people tell their own stories. He listens and analyses, but draws no conclusions. He digs deep into the growing emphasis on modernisation while the great majority is struggling to eke out a living. He not only meets some of the nouveau riche who have made spectacular gains, but he also tells the stories of those on the fringes, for whom new India still means a relentless struggle for survival.

Deb takes the reader through somnolent villages and boisterous cities where he meets the representatives of new India. They include engineers, farmers, migrant workers, trade union activists, Maoists, labour contractors, call centre employees and a waitress from the north-east.

What emerges from these encounters is a complex story with shades of grey. Deb is baffled by the contemporary paradox of incredible innovation alongside incredible inequality. The Simputer that could have made a difference in the lives of the masses never made it to the villages. He finds the sunrise industry of call centres ‘a rather fake world’ where employees have to assume western identities and accents while working at odd hours.

He travels to Bangalore to find out more about the inner life of IT professionals. He meets Chak, a successful NRI who has returned to India. He, like many of his ilk, lives in a gated community, a replica of the American suburb that will keep him secluded from the chaos outside. Deb debunks the image of the IT engineer as a world-builder capable of solving all the problems afflicting India.

He sees IT culture as much about ‘loneliness and a sense of displacement as it is about high salaries and consumer lifestyles’. Surface brashness often conceals the fragility beneath. While referring to the struggle over land following the IT boom in Bangalore and Hyderabad, Deb wonders why so much of Special Economic Zones (SEZ) is taken up for real estate development.

The most engaging chapter is the one on the woes of migrant workers. It is the most hidden, glossed over aspect of globalisation. He visits Mahbubnagar district near Hyderabad and finds that rapid industrialisation has made two-thirds of the adult population migrant workers elsewhere while the local industrial units employed thousands of migrant workers from far off places.

He visits a local steel plant where most of the workers are from Bihar, Orissa and the north-east. Outside the ambit of labour laws, and without any union, they lead the most wretched life in an inhospitable environment. Corrupt officials connive with the owners to make them perennially insecure.

The crisis following the collapse of the red Sorghum market in Nizamabad district exemplifies how freedom of the market gets distorted by intrigue, price fixing and even riots. It is a striking insight into the market forces that call the shots. The hi-tech Andhra Pradesh Chandrababu Naidu had envisioned with advice from McKinsey only drove more farmers to suicide. The support price was the first casualty of Naidu-McKinsey formulation.


Deb’s meetings with Esther, a waitress from the north-east, who has a gruelling work schedule at a glitzy five star hotel in South Delhi, reveal the aspirations and frustrations of a girl from a distant corner who is striving to make it big in the metropolis. But the punishing schedule of over 12 hours’ duty along with two hours of travel one way leaves her thoroughly exhausted.

Delhi has a high concentration of people from the north-east. Women from the north-east are prized for their light skin and good English. This also makes them vulnerable to exploitation — an indictment of new India.

More than facts and figures, the book becomes engaging with its sensitive character sketches as in any good novel. The volume is a well-researched, fascinating account sans ideological baggage, an invaluable addition to the ongoing discourse on new India.

Excellent narrative propelled by powerful prose makes it engrossing. Those who claim that India has already become an economic superpower can’t afford to miss this book. It is a pity that the Indian edition is without the first chapter on self-styled management guru Arindam Chaudhuri following a court injunction which the author describes as the intimidation by the “powerful and the wealthy”.