India Becoming

A Portrait of Life in Modern India

by Akash Kapur
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A portrait of incredible change and economic development, of social and national transformation, told through individual lives

Penguin-Riverhead, March 2012
Excerpted in The New Yorker and The Atlantic Online

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There are many virtues of Akash Kapur’s beautifully sketched portrait of modern India. The book reads like a novel. Kapur’s skill is to get people talking and to weave their stories into a necessarily messy debate about India’s future.

Financial Times

Impressively lucid and searching... In his clarity, sympathy and impeccably sculpted prose, Kapur often summons the spirit of V. S. Naipaul.

Pico Iyer, Time magazine

[R]eadable, acutely observed and crammed with well-drawn characters... Mr Kapur offers a corrective to a simplistic “new, happy narrative” of a rising India. That is welcome and he does it well.

The Economist

A remarkably absorbing account of an India in transition-full of challenges and contradictions, but also of expectations, hope, and ultimately optimism.

Amartya Sen, Nobel Laureate, author of Development as Freedom

A wonderful writer: a courageously clear-eyed observer, an astute listener, a masterful portraitist, and a gripping story teller.

Philip Gourevitch, author of We Wish To Inform you That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With Our Families

Marvelous... Sharp-eyed, insightful, skillfully-sketched and beautifully written, India Becoming is the remarkable debut of a distinctive new talent.

William Dalrymple, author of Nine Lives

Akash Kapur lives in and writes out of an India that few writers venture into. His writing has established him as one of the most reliable observers of the New India.

Pankaj Mishra, author of Temptations of the West

Beautifully written… Celebrates the gains and mourns the losses, conveying a complex story through the lives of some fascinating individual women and men.

Kwame Anthony Appiah, author of Cosmopolitanism
More praise for India Becoming
Read an article about India Becoming in Time India Becoming on NPR's All Things Considered Watch a reading and talk at The Asia Society