The Elephant The Tiger And The Cellphone Reflections On India In The Twentyfirst Century

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 begin 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 ...