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The Elephant, the Tiger and the Cellphone

The Elephant, the Tiger and the Cellphone

THAROOR SHASHI
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For more than four decades after gaining independence, PBI – 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 PBI – India turns sixty, Shashi Tharoor, novelist and essayist, reminds us of the paradox that is PBI – 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 PBI – India? Will it bring the strength of the tiger and the size of an elephant to bear upon the PBI – World? Or will it remain an elephant at heart? In more than sixty essays organized thematically into six parts, Shashi Tharoor analyses the forces that have made twenty-first century PBI – India—and could yet unmake it. He discusses the country’s transformation in his characteristic lucid prose, writing with passion and engagement on a broad range of subjects, from the very notion of ‘PBI – Indianness’ in a pluralist society to the evolution of the once sleeping giant into a PBI – World leader in the realms of science and technology; from the men and women who make up his PBI – India—Gandhi and Nehru and the less obvious Ramanujan and Krishna Menon—to an eclectic array of PBI – Indian experiences and realities, virtual and spiritual, political and filmi. The book is leavened with whimsical and witty pieces on cricket, Bollywood and the national penchant for holidays, and topped off with an A to Z glossary on PBI – Indianness, written with tongue firmly in cheek.

Diverting and instructive as ever, artfully combining hard facts and statistics with personal opinions and observations, Tharoor offers a fresh, insightful look at this timeless and fast-changing society, emphasizing that PBI – India must rise above the past if it is to conquer the future.

Imprint: India Viking

Published: Oct/2007

ISBN: 9780143418948

Length : 404 Pages

MRP : ₹499.00

The Elephant, the Tiger and the Cellphone

THAROOR SHASHI

For more than four decades after gaining independence, PBI – 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 PBI – India turns sixty, Shashi Tharoor, novelist and essayist, reminds us of the paradox that is PBI – 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 PBI – India? Will it bring the strength of the tiger and the size of an elephant to bear upon the PBI – World? Or will it remain an elephant at heart? In more than sixty essays organized thematically into six parts, Shashi Tharoor analyses the forces that have made twenty-first century PBI – India—and could yet unmake it. He discusses the country’s transformation in his characteristic lucid prose, writing with passion and engagement on a broad range of subjects, from the very notion of ‘PBI – Indianness’ in a pluralist society to the evolution of the once sleeping giant into a PBI – World leader in the realms of science and technology; from the men and women who make up his PBI – India—Gandhi and Nehru and the less obvious Ramanujan and Krishna Menon—to an eclectic array of PBI – Indian experiences and realities, virtual and spiritual, political and filmi. The book is leavened with whimsical and witty pieces on cricket, Bollywood and the national penchant for holidays, and topped off with an A to Z glossary on PBI – Indianness, written with tongue firmly in cheek.

Diverting and instructive as ever, artfully combining hard facts and statistics with personal opinions and observations, Tharoor offers a fresh, insightful look at this timeless and fast-changing society, emphasizing that PBI – India must rise above the past if it is to conquer the future.

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THAROOR SHASHI

SHASHI THAROOR is the bestselling author of twenty books, both fiction and non-fiction, besides being a noted critic and columnist. His books include the pathbreaking satire The Great Indian Novel (1989), the classic India: From Midnight to the Millennium (1997), the bestselling An Era of Darkness: The British Empire in India, for which he won the Ramnath Goenka Award for Excellence in Journalism, 2016, for Books (Non-Fiction), and The Paradoxical Prime Minister: Narendra Modi and His India. He has been Under Secretary-General of the United Nations and Minister of State for Human Resource Development and Minister of State for External Affairs in the Government of India. He is a three-time member of the Lok Sabha from Thiruvananthapuram and chairs the Parliament Information
Technology committee. He has won numerous literary awards, including a national Sahitya Akademi award, a Commonwealth Writers' Prize and the Crossword Lifetime Achievement Award. He was awarded the Pravasi Bharatiya Samman, India's highest honour for overseas Indians, in 2004, and honoured as New Age Politician of the Year (2010) by NDTV.

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