The Elephant, The Tiger and The Cellphone: Reflections on India in the Twenty-First Century

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For more than four decades after gaining independence India, with its massive size and population, staggering poverty and slow rate of growth, was associated with the plodding, somnolent elephant, comfortably resting on its achievements of centuries gone by. Then in the early 1990s the elephant seemed to wake up from its slumber and slowly being to change–until today, in the first decade of the twenty-first century, some have begun to see it morphing into a tiger. As India turns sixty, Shashi Tharoor, novelist and essayist, reminds us of the paradox that is India, the elephant that is becoming a tiger: with the highest number of billionaires in Asia, it still has the largest number of people living amid poverty and neglect, and more children who have not seen the inside of a schoolroom, than any other country. So what does the twenty-first century hold for India? Will it bring the strength of the tiger and the size of an elephant to bear upon the world? Or will it remain an elephant at heart? In more than sixty essays organized thematically into six parts, Shashi Tharoor analyses the forces that have made twenty-first century India–and could yet unmake it. He discusses the country’s transformation in his characteristic lucid prose, writing with passion and engagement on a broad range of subjects, from the very notion of ‘Indianness’ in a pluralist society to the evolution of the once sleeping giant into a world leader in the realms of science and technology; from the men and women who make up his India–Gandhi and Nehru and the less obvious Ramanujan and Krishna Menon–to an eclectic array of Indian experiences and realities, virtual and spiritual, political and filmi. The book is leavened with whimsical and witty piece on cricket, Bollywood and the national penchant for holidays, and topped off with an A to Z glossary on Indianness, written with tongue firmly in cheek. Diverting and instructive as ever, artfully combining hard facts and statistics with personnel opinions and observations, Tharoor offers a fresh, insightful look at this timeless and fast-changing society, emphasising that India must rise above the past if it is to conquer the future.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR Shashi Tharoor

Shashi Tharoor After taking his doctorate at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy in Boston, Shashi Tharoor worked for the United Nations in various humanitarian, peace-keeping and management roles for nearly thirty years. He was Under- Secretary-General for Communications and Public Information during the tenure of Kofi Annan and was the runner up in the election to replace him in 2006. He is an acclaimed novelist, author and newspaper columnist. He has 11 books and hundreds of articles to his name. His non-fiction titles include Nehru, the Invention of India (2003) and India: from Midnight to the Millennium (1997). His novels include The Great Indian Novel (1989) and Riot (2001). He has an encyclopaedic knowledge of Indian cricket, which he has followed avidly from afar, and has played in such cricketing hotbeds as Singapore and Geneva.

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Bibliographic information

Title
The Elephant, The Tiger and The Cellphone: Reflections on India in the Twenty-First Century
Author
Edition
1st ed.
Publisher
ISBN
0670081455
Length
xiv+388p.
Subjects

tags

#Elephant