In Spite of the Gods: The Strange Rise of Modern India/ Edward Luce

Global and Medieval: India´s Schizophrenic economy/ The Burra sahibs: The long tentacles of India´s state/Battles of the righteous: The rise of india´s lower castes/ The imaginary horse: The continuing threat of Hindu nationalism/Long live the sycophants: The congress party´s continuing love affair with the nehru-Gandhi dynasty/etc.

India remains a mystery to many Americans, even as it is poised to become the world’s third largest economy within a generation, outstripping Japan. It will surpass China in population by 2032 and will have more English speakers than the United States by 2050. In In Spite of the Gods, Edward Luce, a journalist who covered India for many years, makes brilliant sense of India and its rise to global power. Already a number-one bestseller in India, his book issure to be acknowledged for years as the definitive introduction to modern India.

In Spite of the Gods illuminates a land of many contradictions. The booming tech sector we read so much about in the West, Luce points out, employs no more than one million of India’s 1.1 billion people. Only 35 million people, in fact, have formal enough jobs to pay taxes, while three-quarters of the country lives in extreme deprivation in India’s 600,000 villages. Yet amid all these extremes exists the world’s largest experiment in representative democracy—and a largely successful one, despite bureaucracies riddled with horrifying corruption.