The New Deal

It appears Chaudhuri took umbrage to Debs piece and,citing grave harassment and injury,filed a case in Silchar,over 2,000 km from Delhi.

The Shillong-born Deb journeys across India,interpreting the lives of engineers,farmers,migrants,call-centre workers and waitresses to make sense of rapid globalisation through their personal stories. In the Introduction,Deb describes how he invented details about his past to get a job in a call centre,while on assignment for The Guardian I had to erase traces of the West from my existing self and become a provincial Indian,trying my luck at the outsourcing offices of Noida and Gurgaon. He spent days in recruitment offices on the outskirts of Delhi for tests and interviews,all the while observing youngsters who were wracked with uncertainty and self doubt. Deb left with the rather commonplace impression that the sunrise industry is a superficial world,and that the economic freedom it offers is not compensation enough for dealing with irate customers in the middle of the night.

Deb is not at his best while musing on the state of affairs in the country,on the broad brushstrokes we are familiar with,but hes very engaging while describing his travels through India,and relating anecdotes about the people he meets. Like Abdul Jaffar,a tireless social worker who has an organisation for women rendered destitute by the Bhopal gas tragedy. He fights for victims still struggling for compensation with very little money,mostly contributions by well wishers. As Deb follows him around on a typical day at work,he notes that Jaffars stubborn activism and resilience are intact despite a series of disappointments. These apparent opposites,wealth and poverty,past and present,quietism and activism is all part of the new India.

The Beautiful and the Damned has a chapter on what SEZs and urban expansion have done to farmers caught in a staggering rural crisis. Through the story of red sorghum being cultivated in Armoor in Andhra Pradesh,Deb evaluates the uncomfortable relationship between farmers and the middlemen they rely on,who after anticipating demand decide what the farmers grow. Seed dealers double as money lenders,doling out cash at absurd rates of interest. In a bad year,when a dealer reneged on his offer,farmers found themselves sitting on piles of unsold sorghum. Deb observes,almost despairingly,of the odds slowly piling up against farmers: they are at the mercy of the monsoon and the middlemen and if either cheats prosperous rice-growing farmers can be reduced to landless labourers overnight. Deb draws an interesting analogy between sorghum and cocaine,which have the same elements: syndicates,price fixing,loans and thugs.

Economic migration is a violent process. In his last and most readable chapter,we meet the waitress Esther who moved from Imphal to Delhi,hoping for a better life. Self-conscious and not self-assured,Esther envies north Indian looks and wants nothing more than to blend into Delhi effortlessly. Being different in Delhi means attracting the wrong kind of attention,she says. Esther has a brutally hard workday,from noon till 2 am at Zest,an upscale restaurant in Delhis most fashionable mall. Awe-struck and enthusiastic,she learns quickly,but Delhi,unsafe and uncouth,wears her down. The disillusionment forces her to consider a move back to Imphal as a schoolteacher.

Debs impressions are tactfully expressed throughout,whether hes ruing environmental damage or talking about Maoists,leaving the obvious unsaid,for the reader to ponder on.