In Spite Of The Gods

Good Books: (via Emergic) Here is a brief about the book from Random House:
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 is sure 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.

Luce shows that India is an economic rival to the U.S. in an entirely different sense than China is. There is nothing in India like the manufacturing capacity of China, despite the huge potential labor force. An inept system of public education leaves most Indians illiterate and unskilled. Yet at the other extreme, the middle class produces ten times as many engineering students a year as the United States. Notwithstanding its future as a major competitor in a globalized economy, American leaders have been encouraging India’s rise, even welcoming it into the nuclear energy club, hoping to balance China’s influence in Asia.

The Guardian reviewed Edward Luce’s book in August:
Several recent books have examined the savage inequalities between the country's burgeoning, educated, urban elite and the shockingly poor who live in the vast hinterlands. Luce's thoughtful and thorough book - 'an unsentimental evaluation of contemporary India against the backdrop of its widely expected ascent to great power status in the 21st century' - fits right into this category. He suggests the dichotomy of India in the book's subtitle and later calls India's rise 'strange' because, while becoming an important political and economic force, it has remained 'an intensely religious, spiritual and, in some ways, superstitious society'.

It is always difficult to structure a book like this one, but Luce manages well by breaking up the narrative into neat chapters, each dealing with a different theme and each capable of standing on its own feet. We are offered accounts of India's 'schizophrenic' flourishing economy; its state machinery; its caste conflicts; the rise of Hindu nationalism; the dynastic nature of its politics; its relationship with Pakistan and its Muslim minority; its relationship with the US and China; the country's experience of grappling with modernity and urbanization.

The Hindu Business Line had a detailed review of Luce’s book:
The book concludes with a discussion of India's huge opportunities and challenges in the twenty-first century. Judging by the living conditions of ordinary Indians, rather than by the drama of national events, Luce is of the view that the country is moving forward on a remarkably stable trajectory. And, as opposed to China, India has given a higher priority to stability than it has to efficiency.

'India is like a lorry with twelve wheels. If one or two puncture, it doesn't go into the ditch,' is a quote of Myron Weiner that he cites. That way, China may have fewer wheels so it can travel faster, but 'people far beyond China's borders worry about what would happen if a wheel came off,' notes Luce, extending Weiner's analogy.

Though investors are deterred by the babus, institutional advantages such as an independent judiciary and a free media' may make India the proverbial tortoise that can overtake the Chinese hare, postulates the author. India can also draw on a deep well of intellectual capital.

Yet, for those closer home, a word of caution is not to take our economic strengths for granted. As the joke goes, 'India never misses an opportunity to miss an opportunity'. It is also suffering from a premature spirit of triumphalism, alerts Luce.

I think Luce's book is about the new but morphing India. It's an insightful book about India, and Luce brings an outsider's perspective.