If  you are looking for some meaningful reading then India Calling is just the book. Please don't have any predisposed notion about India Calling – It is not one of those books, which are full of non nonsensical intellectual jargon. With India calling, Anand Giridharadas has aimed to recreate the images of his own country, where he was neither born nor brought up.

As Giridharadas writes in the very first few pages of his book that his father had come to America in his college days. Giridharadas had never seen India until he had come to discover his very own nation. The book is a compilation of  all those good, bad images bound together in carefully chosen conscious and reflective words.

Apart from being a brilliant writer, Giridharadas is a keen observer. The characters described in his novel can be well related to; Venugopal, Ravinder, Mallika, each character seem to evoke a long forgotten, distant memory, as if you have meet them before. Ravinder's small town mentality and his aspirations of  prosperity, Venogopal's  opinions, his insights on politics, caste, creed, religion, Mallika's liberal way of living life and her complicated relationships, each one of them seem to represent some common character in the crowd. Their typical nature and the observant analysis by the author make them so recognizable that you never doubt the reality in their characterization.

The novel is very earthy in feel. Although Marquez and Giridharadas write in completely different genres yet India calling has a Gabriel Garcia Marquezish feel to it. There discovery of Giridharadas own nation is picaresque and poignant. The rustic descriptions of his journey from the metropolitan Mumbai to the developing suburbia of Ludhiana to Umbred. In the first few pages, when Giridharadas narrates how he started talking to an elderly Indian. The elderly man asked him the reason for visiting India while his eyes darted to Giridharadas's American passport, the author replies back saying that he is moving back to India. The elderly Indian pointed out the question pretty appropriately - why is he moving back to India while rest of the Indians are dieing desperate to move and settle down in America? The same notion strikes back as we read through the novel, why is he trying to go back to some of the most obscure places in our nation as that of Umbred while rest of us are trying to move out of it's obscurity. The Answer to this is, I guess, lies in the title of the novel – Its India Calling Anand Giridharadas.

Giridharadas's style of writing is pretty crisp. There is a very restrained flavor of intelligence to his writing. The author does not waste time in giving us a lengthy description of his family. His does not bore his readers with vivid analysis of each situation. He is very straight forward and reveals the main theme of his novel when he declares that he is moving to India from his all American settlement.
 
India calling is a mirror image of the nation painted well by Anand Giridharadas. If you have been waiting for some good writing in a long time now, then India Calling might just be able to satiate your appetite for a good read.

Anand Giridharadas is a writer based in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Born in Cleveland, Ohio, to parents from Bombay, he has also resided in Paris and outside Washington, D.C., where his family still lives. He studied the history of political thought at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, and at St. Edmund Hall, Oxford. His first book, a work of narrative nonfiction about his return to the India that his parents left, was published in early 2011. It is titled “India Calling: An Intimate Portrait of a Nation’s Remaking.” He writes the “Currents” column for The New York Times and its global edition, the International Herald Tribune: it explores fresh ideas, global culture and the social meaning of technology, among other subjects. In 2009, he completed a four-and-a-half-year tour reporting from India for The Times and the Herald Tribune, as their first Bombay presence in the modern era. He reported on India’s transformation, Bollywood, corporate takeovers, terrorism, outsourcing, poverty and democracy. He was appointed a columnist in 2008, writing the “Letter from India” series.

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Reviewed by Sutanuka Sarkar Designed by Subhadip Mukherjee