Review of the new book, The Beautiful and the Damned: A Portrait of the New India by Parul Sehgul (via Q3D). Few salient points for the unrestrained capitalism panacea torch bearers:
- It’s a moment with its own name (“India Shining”) whose mantra is that you’re only as small as your ambitions (an ethos Deb nails in his observation that India’s evolving ideals have been mirrored in the career of actor Amitabh Bachchan, who went “from playing thin angry young men in the seventies to corporate patriarchs in the new millennium”).
- In the boom’s heyday, between 1995 and 2006, two hundred thousand debt-ridden farmers committed suicide. Another four hundred million farmers—one-fourteenth of the world’s population—stand to be displaced. Seventy-seven percent of the population survives on fifty cents a day.
- Beautiful and the Damned digs beneath the self-congratulatory stories India tells itself—all the better to expose the stories it seeks to repress.
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