Is India the world in microcosm?   Find out in Mira Kamdar's Planet India, Scribner Publishing, distributed by Simon and Schuster. A riveting and gripping   must read. Kamdar illuminates with a perceptive, well researched and attentive eye, the promise and perils of the astonishing, meteoric, uneven, transformation of India. 

Defining the new India, she offers unusual perspectives of the world's fastest growing democracy, and reveals how India and foreign investment will affect the world, financially, politically and culturally. Her masterful  handling of a complex  country  with  its sheer volume of characters ,  is deft,  confident,  intelligent ,lending  weight and substance to the book's title, Planet India. 

She pitches and celebrates the arrival of India in a world of affluence and entrepreneurship in the first half of the book with convincing examples. In the next half, she captures the people's speech and condenses the everyday experience of villagers, school children, girl issues, nationalism, migrants, Aids workers, tea distributors and a panorama of individuals. In short, in her own words, "ordinary people dealing with extraordinary times."

Writing from multiple points of view, the book is peppered with   spontaneous, stunning quotes. Kamdar certainly knows how to organize her material. Whether she is talking to Mukesh Ambani,, the chairman of India's biggest company Reliance Industry, or quoting University of Michigan's C K Prahlad the author of The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid,  she caps it with the words of a college going, taxi driver's daughter in one of Bombay's slums.

"You see, America is coming down, whereas India is moving up .You people will not like it. But it is there." Without succumbing to emotional sentimentality, although Kamdar does admit, "India is in my blood, it is also lodged in my heart,"   the provocative, Planet India is not a critique nor a homage but aggressively adventurous, the beginning of an energetic dialogue as she meets people from diverse backgrounds, and inserts them into her own engaging narrative style without mystifying the reader. India's challenges are brought vividly to life with the book becoming a page-turner.

Within the first few pages, Kamdar informs that,"India is the world's youngest country. Fifty percent of India's people are under the age of twenty five. Long after the populations of Europe, the United States and even China will have grown old; India will still be a young country, with no labor shortages and no lack of customers." She shines and illuminates in her detailed explication of the global powerhouse India.

Traveling the length and breadth of the country she is neither romantic nor patronizing but totally atmospheric, blending vivid images of contemporary India with the reality of the community in rural areas.  As  Kamdar talks to taxi drivers, house servants, villagers, street vendors, CEO's, scholars,  global companies, and  media giants with dizzying speed, she realizes that 'No democracy in history has undergone a transformation of India's magnitude of velocity,'' she writes.

She writes in crisp, exhilarating terms of  how India may well unseat America as the media and entertainment superpower,  the core challenges  of India's poor, the explosion of talent and savvy,  of entrepreneurs bursting onto the global scene,  and of India, the opportunity destination.

There is a  chapter on Indian Americans, the prosperous and well educated immigrant group, and venture capital firms, the growing economic clout and coming of age politically scenario,  celebrating  the vitality and opportunities  in America,  the trade stakes  between India and America, and  the erosion of  American dominance.

She also raises harrowing questions about 40 percent of the world's poor living in India, including one third of the world's malnourished children, the social inequality, 800 million people who live on less than $ 2 a day, the growing energy crisis,   and addresses issues of pollution, water shortage, the gritty reality of HIV/AIDS epidemic,   terrorist attacks and the so called Red Corridor linking Maoist rebels in Nepal with guerillas in Sri Lanka.

There is a curious tendency however by Kamdar to ornament her strong prose, and concise text with lavish, naïve detail on the celebrities she meets reminding one of Page 3 in Indian newspapers.  She writes of the 'Cultural cream of Indian society in New York" and meeting the "stunning wife" of Salman Rushdie, 'guests in fancy Indian dress" the" accomplished violinist husband" of 'celebrated actress and author" Madhur Jaffrey et al.

In Kumar's words,  we catch  “a glimpse  of India's future, its possibilities, its perils…for as goes India, so goes the world." But as Kamdar says with a feverish urgency, "The challenge is also to act quickly and to deal with multiple crises all at once. India does not have the luxury of time."

Mira Kamdar is a Senior Fellow at the World Policy Institute and an Associate Fellow of the Asia Society.  She has provided expert commentary on India for CNN, International News, the BBC, and NPR. She lives in New York with her husband and two children. Simon & Schuster inaugurated its first Indian publishing program with its first title, Scribner's, Planet India.

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