It was quite a week through India with a client team. Modern
campuses of several Indian and Western outsourcing vendors. Spanking new planes
of Jet and Kingfisher, two of India’s
new generation carriers. Shiny Toyota Innova minivans. A fusion meal at the
Leela in Bangalore.
The trip was punctuated by having Sunita Williams ,
the NASA astronaut on my flight back to the US. She had delighted India during her 2 week visit here. She graciously wrote and signed a note to
my chess playing daughter Rita: “Chess will challenge your mind to great heights”.
All symbols of the the new, global India. So it was a nice change of pace to catch a meal in the old India- at the Leopold Cafe in Mumbai. 126
years old! Run by descendants of Persians who migrated to India starting in the 7th century.
But the visit to the Leopold brought the biggest gift of
all. Someone introduced me to Shantaram.
The book starts off at the Leopold, and takes the author Gregory David Roberts,
a fugitive from Australia into the slums of Bombay, to a farm, to a leper
colony, to Bollywood and more (and later to the war in Afghanistan). The 900 pages will be put to film next year with Johnny Depp as the main character.
The book is set in the 80s, but the locations and characters
are timeless. And not stuff visitors typically get to explore. And topics the
modern India would rather not discuss. It is a book about survival – and the pursuit of happiness
- at the bottom of the pyramid. It’s set in India. But it could as well be set
in China.
In Africa. In the immigrant slums in Paris. In the ghettos of
many US cities. What's unique of course, is the varied Hindu, Muslim, Christian and other
philosophical perspectives the author liberally sprinkles on the
pages – unique to India’s
liberal multi-culturalism.
On a flight during the week, I also read an article on
Malgudi - a fictional town in S. India set in the 1930s. More of timeless India.
In the razzle dazzle of India's technology success, it is easy to forget that TCS, Infosys, Wipro, Satyam and other tigers still only make up 5% of India's GDP.
