Gurcharan Das recounts the hope and despair of the last fifty years. The Licence Raj created a work environment in which a cousin of the author, one his first day at work in the railways, could precipitate a strike just because he was honest. An on one occasion, the author, even though a seasoned executive, was driven to sit by the polluted Yamuna and weep after a fruitless meeting with a bureaucrat. The transformation began in the golden summer of 1991, when a reticent reformer, Prime Minister P. V. Narasimha Rao, finally changed the nation's course through sweeping economic reforms. A restrictive regime, in which the state dictated everything, from a woman's choice of lipstick to the programmes on television, gave way to the optimism of a rising middle class eager to compete with the rest of the world. It was a quiet revolution, one that has not been chronicled before.
Gurcharan Das examines the high's and lows of independent India through the prism of history and his own experiences and those of numerous others he has met following the reforms, from young people in sleepy UP villages to the chiefs of software companies in Bangalore. Defining and exploring the new mindset of the nation, India Unbound is the perfect introduction to contemporary India.
Here is a totally fresh look at India based on today's values. Unlike other books on India, its heroes are not political figures but private individuals. And the dualism that it focuses on is not between the rich and the poor, nor the village and the city, but the contrast between the vibrant private space in India versus the impoverished public space.
Mr. Das argues that "India embraced democracy first and capitalism afterwards and this has made all the difference. India became a full fledged democracy in 1950, with universal suffrage and extensive human rights, but it was not until 1991 that it opened up to the free play of market forces. This curious historic inversion means that India's future will not be a creation of unbridled capitalism, but it will evolve through a daily dialogue between the conservative forces of caste, religion and the village, the leftist and Nehruvian socialist forces which dominated the intellectual life of the country for 40 years, and the new forces of global capitalism. These 'million negotiations of democracy,' the plurality of interests, the contentious nature of the people, and the lack of discipline and teamwork imply that the pace of economic reforms will be slow and incremental. It means that India will not grow as rapidly as the Asian tigers, nor wipe out poverty and ignorance as quickly."
"The Economist has been trying, with some frustration, to paint stripes on India since 1991," adds Das, "It doesn't realise that India will never be a tiger. It is an elephant that has begun to lumber and move a head. It will never have speed, but it will always have stamina." And in moving into the future, if India manages to avoid the negative side-effects of an unprepared capitalist society and hold it own against the onslaught of global culture, then, states Das, "it is, perhaps, a wise elephant."
The story of this "silent revolution" is narrated in the first person by someone who has lived and intimately participated in it. He breathes life into the clash of economic and social ideas by recounting how one middle class family has lived its life and responded to the ups and downs of the past fifty years.
Honestly, I couldn't put the book down for a minute. I finished the book, cover to cover, in three days. In my opinion, this is one of the finest books ever written about India (in the same league as 'Freedom at Midnight'). This book is not only superbly written, but also provides valuable insight and perspective.
The author discusses his childhood, his humble beginnings in corporate India, and his views about socialism and capitalism. In parallel, he discusses history, India's freedom, Indian politics and government, the Indian bureaucracy and even the caste system. Most endearing though, is how he describes the events in his life in a broader perspective of national politics and policies. He performs insightful analysis of the workings of Indian bureaucracy and how it influenced/touched not just his life, but the lives of millions and the workings of corporate India. He talks about all the failed attempts to reform government in the past (including his own) and the failures of the people in power to perform introspection and to do course correction.
He talks about the new beginnings after the reforms of 1991, the hopes and aspirations of millions in this new millenium, the IT boom, and the wonderful possibilities of the future.
This book is a must read for anyone who feels strongly about India.
This book is an excellent critical review of Mr Nehru and his successors' economic approach, which was based on state socialism, and led to economic stagnation, the growth of useless and stifling bureaucracy, and ultimately, India's isolation from the capitalist economies. Mr Das describes his position as democratic capitalism, and assumes that India's economic and social problems can be solved through her full and wholehearted participation in the global world economy. I personally think that he is overoptimistic, but tend to agree with the general thrust of his critique. The book is easy to read and does not come through as a boring academic exercise.