Best of 2012

Everyone else seems to use the end of the year as a chance to make a random, marginally interesting list of things that they read/did/discovered.  My hunch is that the major purpose of this is to make it seem like the writer is very smart, very accomplished, and very well traveled.  Most people won’t click through on the links they choose or the recommended books, so there’s little chance of being called out on anything.  Risk-free bragging opportunity.  Hard to pass up, so here it goes:

Best books I read

Behind the Beautiful Forevers  by Katherine Boo

If you read one book next year, let it be this.  An incredible window into the world of a Mumbai slum, and one of the most beautifully written works of non-fiction ever.  It will reel you in and hopefully lead you to rethink a lot of assumptions about urban poverty and how to alleviate it.  Should be required reading for anyone working in development in South Asia.

Animal Farm by George Orwell

Isn’t it amazing how some books always feel like the author is writing about today’s world?  This one blew my mind with its relevance.  I had always pretended to have read it, without ever opening it up. 

Case of Exploding Mangoes by Mohammed Hanif

I’ll be the first to admit that it was the title that led me to buy this book.  And actually, two chapters in I almost quit reading.  But I’m glad that I stuck through it because from there it heated up quickly.   It was an interesting rebellion against the way we usually consider fate.  And writing that’s so dry that the reader is constantly wondering if the joke is on her.

Currencies of change

"Yesterday I was clever, so I wanted to change the world. 

Today I am wise, so I am changing myself."

Rumi

The world is vast.  The more I travel, the more aware I become of the diversity and more precisely, the multi-dimensionality of social issues and inequalities.  When I first started moving between East and West, North and South, what is glaringly is the poverty.  With time, you stop seeing poverty as the defining characteristic of a city or country.  Even if what you are most interested in is poverty, you start to see it through a prism, rather than as a uniform experience or thing.  You look at infrastructure—roads, electricity, water, cell phones—and service provision—schools, police, health care, social protection—and perhaps above all—aspiration.  Coming from America, the rate of social change in Asia is something that constantly takes my breath away.  It’s not unusual to have three generations coexisting under one roof, but each with a very different set of values, that often conflict.  In Delhi, I would see a girl who looked like she was dressed to walk around Manhattan, happily chattering on an iphone, with a bag of Nike sports gear on her arm, with a mother in a traditional sari trailing a few steps behind.  Newspapers had articles about how to get over a bad breakup just pages after the tragic news of a husband shot by his wife’s family, who disapproved of their decision to elope and marry for love.  Social change itself is a complex, multidimensional process that is far from unidirectional.  The massive migration of villagers to cities has meant that in some ways, they have grown more conservative.  Since I have parachuted just in and out of India over the years, much of the change is invisible to me, but not all. The Haus Khaus Village that I discovered in 2009 on my first trip to Delhi is an example of an old artist hangout that transformed into a hipster center, complete with coffee shops and eccentric restaurants, and now has fully blossomed into high-end art galleries, designer stores, and expensive bars.  Luckily my restaurant Gunpowder, serving delicious Southern Indian food in a great space that looks out on the lake, seems to have weathered the change.  I went to lunch at Elma’s teashop and had baked eggs and ham.  Strange concept that was saved by the huge amount of gruyere cheese that covered it.  I followed it by a slice of red velvet cake, which had icing that just melted in your mouth.