The Beautiful and the Damned: Life in the New 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. Available for the first time with the controversial and previously unpublished first chapter, The Beautiful and the Damned is as important and incisive today as it was when it was first published.

About the Author :
Born in north-eastern India in 1970, Siddhartha Deb is the author of two novels. A contributing editor to the New Republic, Deb's journalism, essays and reviews have appeared in the Guardian, the New York Times, n+1, Caravan, the Nation, the Baffler and the Times Literary Supplement. He is the recipient of grants and fellowships from the Society of Authors, the Radcliffe Institute of Advanced Studies at Harvard University and the Howard Foundation at Brown University.

Review :
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. Siddhartha Deb is a marvelous participatory journalist, a keen observer of contemporary India. [ . . . ] Anyone wanting to understand contemporary India's glaring contradictions, its juxtapositions of glittering boomtowns with horrific slums, should read Deb's wonderfully researched and elegantly written account [An] incisive new look at life on the subcontinent. [ . . . ] For those who have never been to India, the book will be an eye-opening read. For those more familiar with the country, it will be essential. This brave book strikes a rare note - as a work of journalism and as an interpretation of India's maladies. The Beautiful and the Damned digs beneath the self-congratulatory stories India tell itself - all the better to expose the stories it seeks to repress. This is a brilliant and sensitive book that succeeds in shifting our gaze from the dazzling glass and steel towers of the business park to the collateral damage suffered by people caught in the age-old tensions between economic mirage, constricting cultural tradition and overbearing social expectation. In his subtle, sometimes startlingly intelligent narrative, Deb is drawn to the idea of pretence, and to pretenders, of which he--writer, confidant, friend, provincial, global traveler--is one himself [ . . . ] In these pages, Deb is quickened by his extraordinary feeling for the texture of lower middle-class life, as well as his unerring sensitivity to the way a country yet again transforms itself. A compelling read. The author's experience as a journalist ensures that he hardly wastes a word, his local knowledge gives him depth and empathy, while his status as a novelist seems to protect him from intrusive literary flourishes [ . . . ] Deb generally offers a shrewder, more humane perspective than most travelogues. As a first-hand report, this is authentic, assured and absolutely engrossing, acutely pinpointing the aspirational tragic-comic ironies of modern India.