Anand Giridharadas, India Calling & SAYA

Traveling to India with Anand Giridharadas

Anand Giridharadas’s ‘India Calling’ – evocative and insightful – is almost a road map to the New India which has so much of the old India mixed in it. The book has been re-introducing young Indian-Americans to the land many left as children or may have never seen. Then there is the older generation of Indian-Americans who came as immigrants many years ago and still see the India they left decades ago, frozen in time.

Recently, Giridharadas was at a Manhattan apartment introducing the New India to a group of  about 60 women with a book reading and a vigorous Q and A. The event was a benefit, organized at the home of Poonam Kewalramani by Usha Saxena, who is the chairperson of  the board of directors of  South Asian Youth Action ( SAYA!), an organization which assists young South Asians in Queens to have a better future, with mentoring and after-school activities.   Giridharadas did another book reading in the evening in support of SAYA! at the home of  Ritu Sahai Mittal and Manish Mittal.  (Find out more about SAYA! at www.saya.org )

As Saxena pointed out, many of the South Asian families in Queens are largely employed as taxi drivers, construction workers, restaurant and domestic workers or are other service sector employees. These jobs involve long hours and few benefits and leave families with little disposable income.

“The current economic climate has a tremendous impact on immigrant families,” she said. “South Asian high school students often work to supplement their family income.  They face the same pressures as other adolescents including the influence of gangs, substance abuse and street violence.”

SAYA! offers these children the capacity to imagine an alternate lifestyle through career days and mentoring. It currently offers after school programs at its center in Elmhurst, Queens and at four public schools: Flushing High School, Middle School 137 (Ozone Park), Primary School 124 (South Ozone Park) and Richmond Hill High School.

India Calling –  The Return Journey

Anand Giridharadas, who writes the “Currents” column for the International Herald Tribune and The New York Times online, had the crowd totally engaged with his book reading, with the India his parents had left in the 70’s and the India to which he had returned. He talked of his reverse journey and his complicated relationship with India. He spent six years in India and found that the country his parents had left had become another country.

“That old country was still around and yet there was very clearly this new country being born in the middle of it and I set out trying to explain how one became the other, what was the essence of that one, what was the essence of this one,” he said.

After the reading and spirited Q and A, Giridharadas was asked how India had changed him. “It only made me drink bottled water!” he joked. Then more seriously, he said, “It changed me a lot.”  He spoke about the American way of life where his parents had given him and his sister a sense that they could make anything of their lives, could create their own stories. Giridharadas said, “I think what is missing in America is the converse of that – which is a way of living with others. In America you often don’t know who your neighbors are.”

In India there is  the sense of connections with family and friends, that very Indian way of being socially networked. He said, “It’s a lot like Facebook – I once wrote an article about how Facebook is a return to village sociability.” He recalls his grandmother in India who hardly moved out yet had at least 150 people in her network, people whom she knew everything about, a radar awareness of the fate of these people.  He said, “What I gained in India was a bit of that radar consciousness. People sometimes make fun of me at my dinner parties for feeding them like an Indian mother – but it’s just about being aware of who’s eaten, who’s not – it’s those little things which come from a heightened sensitivity to people.”

Few book parties in India could be ending with a playing of the Indian National Anthem and people standing to attention but in this elegant Manhattan apartment that was what happened, after which there was a fusion lunch of Thai and Indian food, topped with Italian desserts. Yes, this is the American desi’s new world, globalized, hybridized – but always, always Indian at heart.

Anand Giridharadas’s ‘India Calling – An Intimate Portrait of a Nation’s Remaking’

The New India – A Sneak Peek

(Anand Giridharadas speaking on India’s consumer culture at Asia Society.)

“The deepest change that I witnessed in India was not in what its factories were building or what its programmers were coding. It was in the mind, in how people conceived of their possibilities: Indians now seemed to know that they didn’t have to leave, as my father had, to have their personal revolutions.

Children of the lower castes were hoisting themselves up, one diploma at a time. Women were becoming breadwinners through micro-credit and decentralized manufacturing. The young were finding in their cell phones a first zone of privacy and individual identity.

Couples were ending marriages no matter what “society” thought, then finding love again. Servants whose mothers and grandmothers had been servants were deciding that their daughters would not be servants, enrolling them in private English language schools. Vegetarians were embracing meat, and meat eaters were turning vegetarian, defining themselves by taste and trend, not by caste and faith.

What seemed in decline, in short, was what had most afflicted me about India once: that serene acceptance by people of life as it merely is.”

– India Calling – An Intimate Portrait of a Nation’s Remaking

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