The Girl with the Golden Parasol

Начало книги

Rahul, a non-Brahmin college boy, falls in love with Anjali, a Brahmin girl. This shouldn’t be a problem in today’s modern India of shopping malls, cell phones, and high tech, right? Surely the new forces of progress have begun to level the ancient hierarchies of caste.

The news of these new forces — vast changes unleashed by the economic reforms of the 1990s — has steadily reached our shores. Liberalization has brought a steep rise in capital influx and mass consumerism to an Indian society that is, in many ways, now utterly transformed. Call centers, cheap cars, job growth from outsourcing, and a flourishing IT sector have shaped a new image of India in the eyes of the West, while tales of Indians on the move and romantic rags-to-riches stories still compete with familiar pieces about the “old” India: poverty, corruption, riots. Those who can keep up with the aggressive market prosper, while others who don’t get with the program may be marked for extinction, according to Uday Prakash in his short story “The Walls of Delhi”: “The poor, the sick, the street corner prophets, the lowly, the unexceptional — all gone! They’ve vanished from this new Delhi of wealth and wizardry, never to return, not here, not anywhere.”

Читать дальше →