The Beautiful and the Damned: A Portrait of the New India
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The Beautiful and the Damned presents an affecting, incisive portrait of the vast, fascinating, and incongruent country that is globalized India.
Siddhartha Deb grew up in a remote town in the northeastern hills of India and made his way to the United States via a fellowship at Columbia. Six years after leaving home, he returned as an undercover reporter for The Guardian, working at a call center in Delhi in 2004, a time when globalization was fast proceeding and Thomas L. Friedman declared the world flat. Deb's experience interviewing the call-center staff led him to undertake this book and travel throughout the subcontinent.
The Beautiful and the Damned examines India's many contradictions through various individual and extraordinary perspectives. With lyrical and commanding prose, Deb introduces the reader to an unforgettable group of Indians, including a Gatsby-like mogul in Delhi whose hobby is producing big-budget gangster films that no one sees; a wiry, dusty farmer named Gopeti whose village is plagued by suicides and was the epicenter of a riot; and a sad-eyed waitress named Esther who has set aside her dual degrees in biochemistry and botany to serve Coca-Cola to arms dealers at an upscale hotel called Shangri La.
Like no other writer, Deb humanizes the post-globalization experience—its advantages, failures, and absurdities. India is a country where you take a nap and someone has stolen your job, where you buy a BMW but still have to idle for cows crossing your path. A personal, narrative work of journalism and cultural analysis in the same vein as Adrian Nicole LeBlanc's Random Family and V. S. Naipaul's India series, The Beautiful and the Damned is an important and incisive work.
A Publishers Weekly Best Nonfiction Book
A Globe and Mail Best Books of the Year
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Siddhartha Deb. (2011). The Beautiful and the Damned: A Portrait of the New India. Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
Chicago / Turabian - Author Date Citation (style guide)Siddhartha Deb. 2011. The Beautiful and the Damned: A Portrait of the New India. Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
Chicago / Turabian - Humanities Citation (style guide)Siddhartha Deb, The Beautiful and the Damned: A Portrait of the New India. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2011.
MLA Citation (style guide)Siddhartha Deb. The Beautiful and the Damned: A Portrait of the New India. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2011.
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- bioText: Siddhartha Deb, who teaches creative writing at the New School, is the author of the novels The Point of Return, a 2003 New York Times Notable Book of the Year, and An Outline of the Republic. He is also the author of the nonfiction book The Beautiful and the Damned: A Portrait of the New India. His reviews and journalism have appeared in The Boston Globe, The Guardian, Harper's Magazine, The Nation, New Statesman, n+1, and The Times Literary Supplement.
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The Beautiful and the Damned presents an affecting, incisive portrait of the vast, fascinating, and incongruent country that is globalized India.
Siddhartha Deb grew up in a remote town in the northeastern hills of India and made his way to the United States via a fellowship at Columbia. Six years after leaving home, he returned as an undercover reporter for The Guardian, working at a call center in Delhi in 2004, a time when globalization was fast proceeding and Thomas L. Friedman declared the world flat. Deb's experience interviewing the call-center staff led him to undertake this book and travel throughout the subcontinent.
The Beautiful and the Damned examines India's many contradictions through various individual and extraordinary perspectives. With lyrical and commanding prose, Deb introduces the reader to an unforgettable group of Indians, including a Gatsby-like mogul in Delhi whose hobby is producing big-budget gangster films that no one sees; a wiry, dusty farmer named Gopeti whose village is plagued by suicides and was the epicenter of a riot; and a sad-eyed waitress named Esther who has set aside her dual degrees in biochemistry and botany to serve Coca-Cola to arms dealers at an upscale hotel called Shangri La.
Like no other writer, Deb humanizes the post-globalization experience—its advantages, failures, and absurdities. India is a country where you take a nap and someone has stolen your job, where you buy a BMW but still have to idle for cows crossing your path. A personal, narrative work of journalism and cultural analysis in the same vein as Adrian Nicole LeBlanc's Random Family and V. S. Naipaul's India series, The Beautiful and the Damned is an important and incisive work.
A Publishers Weekly Best Nonfiction Book
A Globe and Mail Best Books of the Year- reviews
- premium: False
- source: Samanth Subramanian, The New York Times
- content:
"Splendid . . . Similar to F. Scott Fitzgerald . . . Deb works largely within the format of the profile, which allows him to closely inspect the dents made by modern India in his characters' lives. . . There is a nuance to even the direst of Deb's pessimisms--an acknowledgement that India's lives are newly precarious precisely because they could swing either the way of opportunity or the way of ruin."
- premium: False
- source: Chuck Leddy, Minneapolis Star Tribune
- content: "Siddhartha Deb is a marvelous participatory journalist, a keen observer of contemporary India. In The Beautiful and the Damned he dives head-first into the places where change is happening, temporarily inhabiting these evolving, often confusing sub-worlds, talking to those benefiting from (and victimized by) said changes, and explaining in prose both highly personal and sociologically insightful how India's people and culture are coping."
- premium: False
- source: Nitin Das Rai, The Daily
- content: "[An] incisive new look at life on the subcontinent . . . One of Deb's most stunning achievements is the way he deconstructs India's IT industry. With remarkable clarity, he describes a business dominated by Brahmins (India's ruling caste) in which, contrary to common perception, call center workers struggle to eke out a sustainable living, and where even for those who do succeed there lies at the end of the road little more than an ersatz version of suburbia."
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June 6, 2011
Deb (The Point of No Return) offers a refreshingly skeptical rejoinder to the feel-good narratives of an ascendant India happily contributing to and benefiting from globalization. His mosaic of stories of striving, hopes dashed or realized, is more craggy, gritty, and realistic than the glossy accounts of information technology and free markets as benign, modernizing forces. He follows various individualsâa community activist, a dubiously credentialed salesman, a struggling provincial waitress both liberated and hemmed in by her life in New Delhiâas some of the millions of Indians who've flung themselves headlong into their nation's transformation and "feel both empowered and excluded... quick to express a sense of victimization, voicing their anger about being excluded from the elite while being callously indifferent to the truly impoverished." While his singling out the apparent opposites created by rapid social transformation, "visibility and invisibility, past and present, wealth and poverty, quietism and activism" isn't a new approach, his examples of how India is being "remade forcefully" and unevenly are insightful. Passing a police squad gunning for a Maoist rebel agitating for better conditions in a poor rural area, the author notes, "it was almost impossible not to give in to the pleasure of the new, smoothly tarred highway with its carefully demarcated lanes."
- premium: True
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June 15, 2011
A frank look at modern India, told through the stories of its most hopeful and its most desperate people.
After working undercover in an Indian call center as part of a journalistic assignment, novelist Deb (Creative Writing/New School; An Outline of the Republic, 2005, etc.) asked himself a very simple yet loaded question: Who am I? Where do I fit in this modern-day India? It's this query that spurred the author to begin his quest; over five years, he assembled a somewhat coherent portrait of this jumbled country of contradictions. The book tells the story of five different people, from a man Deb likens to Jay Gatsby because his wealth is tainted by the suspicion of his fellow Indians, to a factory worker who works a dangerous job with no benefits or compensation in case of injury. Each of his subjects comes from a different part of India, with dissimilar backgrounds and disparate fortunes; each has experienced hardship on some level. These stories are sometimes droll and always have at least a tinge of tragedy. Deb impressively chronicles the dichotomies that exist within India while keeping the narrative intensely personal. He puts a human face on horrific statistics that are so large as to be incomprehensible—e.g., from 2004 to 2005, "the last year for which data was available, the total number of people in India consuming less than 20 rupees (or 50 cents) a day was 836 million – or 77 percent of the population." Though the book lacks an overarching narrative to tie these stories together, which can make it a difficult read at times, Deb briskly moves the story along. The author successfully argues his broad points about India's status as a country of opposites while maintaining the reader's personal connection with the people in it.
With passion and grace, Deb deftly paints a vivid picture of the difficulties and dichotomies facing the people of today's India.
(COPYRIGHT (2011) KIRKUS REVIEWS/NIELSEN BUSINESS MEDIA, INC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.)
- premium: True
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April 1, 2011
Deb grew up in northeastern India, won a fellowship to Columbia, published two novels plus lots of reviews and other pieces (e.g., Boston Globe, n + 1), then returned to India to work underground for the Guardian at a call center in New Delhi. He turned his experiences into this account of the massive contradictions of India, where BMWs idle before gentle cows. India's future matters, and as a novelist Deb should give his writing a narrative arc. Read with Patrick French's India: A Portrait, out in June.
Copyright 2011 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.
- premium: True
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- content:
June 15, 2011
A frank look at modern India, told through the stories of its most hopeful and its most desperate people.
After working undercover in an Indian call center as part of a journalistic assignment, novelist Deb (Creative Writing/New School; An Outline of the Republic, 2005, etc.) asked himself a very simple yet loaded question: Who am I? Where do I fit in this modern-day India? It's this query that spurred the author to begin his quest; over five years, he assembled a somewhat coherent portrait of this jumbled country of contradictions. The book tells the story of five different people, from a man Deb likens to Jay Gatsby because his wealth is tainted by the suspicion of his fellow Indians, to a factory worker who works a dangerous job with no benefits or compensation in case of injury. Each of his subjects comes from a different part of India, with dissimilar backgrounds and disparate fortunes; each has experienced hardship on some level. These stories are sometimes droll and always have at least a tinge of tragedy. Deb impressively chronicles the dichotomies that exist within India while keeping the narrative intensely personal. He puts a human face on horrific statistics that are so large as to be incomprehensible--e.g., from 2004 to 2005, "the last year for which data was available, the total number of people in India consuming less than 20 rupees (or 50 cents) a day was 836 million - or 77 percent of the population." Though the book lacks an overarching narrative to tie these stories together, which can make it a difficult read at times, Deb briskly moves the story along. The author successfully argues his broad points about India's status as a country of opposites while maintaining the reader's personal connection with the people in it.
With passion and grace, Deb deftly paints a vivid picture of the difficulties and dichotomies facing the people of today's India.
(COPYRIGHT (2011) KIRKUS REVIEWS/NIELSEN BUSINESS MEDIA, INC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.)
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The Beautiful and the Damned presents an affecting, incisive portrait of the vast, fascinating, and incongruent country that is globalized India.
Siddhartha Deb grew up in a remote town in the northeastern hills of India and made his way to the United States via a fellowship at Columbia. Six years after leaving home, he returned as an undercover reporter for The Guardian, working at a call center in Delhi in 2004, a time when globalization was fast proceeding and Thomas L. Friedman declared the world flat. Deb's experience interviewing the call-center staff led him to undertake this book and travel throughout the subcontinent.
The Beautiful and the Damned examines India's many contradictions through various individual and extraordinary perspectives. With lyrical and commanding prose, Deb introduces the reader to an unforgettable group of Indians, including a Gatsby-like mogul in Delhi whose hobby is producing big-budget gangster films that...- sortTitle
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