In “India Calling cards,” Giridharadas’ readable, conniving book, he reverses directions, taking work in Bombay after calibrating from the University of Michigan.
Here, he describes his parents’ adaptation in 1979:
“It wasn’t long before my mother was backing a red Oldsmobile, larger than a lot of Indian dwellings, down an icy driveway in Shaker altitudes, not long before my father, with his Indian accent, was counseling the executives of America’s ahead companies . . . They ascertained new music that was not their own music, new food not their own food. They accepted up new styles of dressing. They soaked in the world . . . They kept reinventing themselves, casting aside the invention, starting anew.”
Giridharadas attended Hawken and University schools before the category moved to Maryland. On vacations to Bombay, he remembers, “India felt frozen. It was blocked in poverty, and I sensed, even as a child, that everything was determined by scarcity: the pushing to get on the airplane, the disinclination of the wealthy to spend the most trivial sums of money, the compulsion with lucrative careers and snobbery toward other pursuits.”
Not so in 2003, when he comes in Bombay (now known as Mumbai) to work first for McKinsey & Co., then as a newsman for the International Herald Tribune.
In three decades, the city has sprawling to contain 19 million people, almost half in beautiful apartments and gated communities. Every minute of every day, 31 migrators move from “languorous villages to beating cities.”
Giridharadas is intrigued to find emptiness cleaners instead of twig brooms; credit cards, not amber necklaces; SWOT analyses, not Kabir’s poetry.
Being a fantastic journalist — intrepid, easy to like, curious — Giridharadas seeks out “the almost powerful private citizen of India since Gandhi,” Mukesh Ambani.
Mukesh is a tough street fighter who runs Reliance, an energy and material giant. He knows the names of his employees’ mates and children, and if someone needs a surgery or college tuition, he can adjoin the Mayo Clinic or Stanford University.
He makes no apologias for the spies and moles Reliance uses, or for his street aches, his brown skin or an “Indianness” that emphasizes kinships over rigid British mores.
Giridharadas also meets Ravindra, an enterpriser in central India. Ravindra refused to stay at bay in a ghetto of Bhiwapur; he studied Dale Carnegie’s “How to Win Friends and act upon People” and became a motivational speaker, staging a each year Mr. and Miss Personality Contest, and caring India’s highly abided by roller-skating team.
All over the country, Giridharadas finds similar stirrings, ambitious Indians who choose to stay put. He marvels at this, at&t calling cards “it is a milestone in any nation’s life when to leave becomes a choice, not a necessity.”