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kdferrin's review against another edition
2.0
I really liked the premise of this book and it had a lot of potential but it just didn’t live up to it. Everything about the book, the story lines, the minor characters, and even the main character didn’t quite feel complete. I was left feeling like I was reading a rough draft instead of a polished novel. Then to add insult to injury the ending
Spoiler
was one of those horrible fast forward several years and ta-da! everything is fantastic endingsthoughtsofbee's review against another edition
2.0
Wait. What?
This book just leaves you hanging! What was so special about Anjali? What does she exactly do? Her greatest achievement was knowing the right people at the right time? Who exactly is Miss New India? Someone who relies on the help of other people while actively doing nothing? The book tried really hard to portray a new generation of women taking over India. But the attempt was so forceful that all you get is a ghost of an idea.
This book just leaves you hanging! What was so special about Anjali? What does she exactly do? Her greatest achievement was knowing the right people at the right time? Who exactly is Miss New India? Someone who relies on the help of other people while actively doing nothing? The book tried really hard to portray a new generation of women taking over India. But the attempt was so forceful that all you get is a ghost of an idea.
shelleyrae's review against another edition
3.0
Stifled by tradition and expectation, nineteen year old Anjali accepts the help of an unconventional professor to escape an arranged marriage and her small town of Gauripaur in rural India. She dreams of a new life in Bangalore, perhaps with a successful career or a Bollywood style romance but the reality is not what she expects. Boarding in a crumbling mansion, Angali's megawatt smile and passable American English do not provide the advantages she has hoped. Painfully naive, she falls victim to her ruthless housemates as her illusions shatter around her.
Set in contemporary Indian society, Miss New India is an interesting insight into the changing culture of the country with it's increased share of the global market due to Western outsourcing. Customer Support Agencies (ie. call centers) train their employees to speak 'accentless' English and embrace an American/English identity inflating it's value against the traditional Indian culture. For many of those raised in marginal castes or regions the new employment opportunities (and high pay) offered are an irresistible lure and for women like Mukherjee's character, Anjali, a way to escape family expectations and earn independence.
I'm really not sure if Anjali's character and her experiences are intended to act as a warning, or encouragement for the young women of India searching for a career. The consequence of Anjali's fleeing from her home, after rejecting an arranged marriage, is her father's suicide/death and permanent estrangement from her mother and sister. Almost immediately after her arrival in Bangalore, Anjali is out of her depth and simply sinks further into trouble, mostly as a result of her own naivety. It is her female housemates, women who purport to work in the call center industry, that betray her and she is rescued repeatedly by men who have standing in Indian society. Initially I was sympathetic to Anjali's situation and her determination to make her own way but I felt she was quickly revealed to be quite weak and I lost interest in her struggle.
I also felt the plot was overcrowded with issues, Anjali becomes involved in rape, a Muslim terrorist plan, riots, a ring of thieves and prostitutes. I thought the impact of the call centers on Indian society and individual identity was an interesting enough theme to carry the novel without all the extra complications.
The language is good, though I thought it a bit dense at times. Mukherjee integrates a lot of information about Indian culture that I found interesting, like the myriad of spoken dialects and class structure, but it does tend to clutter the story. Initially the pace is a little quiet but becomes frenzied as events and characters trips over each other in the last third of the story.
There is a lot to like and learn from this novel yet I really found it slow going. Miss New India is a novel that leaves me in a quandary of indecision, so I think it's best to leave any definitive recommendation out.
millertimereads's review against another edition
2.0
2.5 stars if Goodreads allowed halves. I was really intrigued to learn about a young Indian woman's journey from bucking the chauvinist old school society where her father was to choose her husband from newspaper ads to a new independent life in Bangalore where the "new India" is emerging and giving women a chance to choose their own destiny. But ultimately I really struggled to identify with Anjali. I think she was supposed to come across as a Bridget Jones type character, someone a bit silly but endearing. Instead she comes off as dim and worthless when it comes to actually pursuing a career. I guess I wanted a narrative involving a story of a woman with newfound freedoms realizing her potential, but that's just not this novel. I will say it was interesting, and sobering, to learn about the American imitation classes the call center agents take, and I liked that the book raised questions about the cost of the New India - i.e. being always beholden to the US. But overall, the book just didn't enchant me.
sharonfalduto's review against another edition
Really, the only reason I bothered to finish this book was that I didn't have anything else checked out from the library. The book took too long for something to happen, and then it seemed like things kept happening TO the main character, Anjali/Angie, without her doing much of anything. The author also presumed a familiarity with Indian culture that I don't actually have. It was an okay read, but not great.
dei2dei's review against another edition
4.0
Another look at India - perhaps a bit melodramatic, but at the same time, all too realistic, all too easily imaginable. Anjali Bose looks to leave small-town Bihar and go somewhere big, exciting, full of possibilities - and when she finds herself in Bangalore, she finds herself confronting more than she expected. This looks at a woman of modern India - trying to go from one thing to another, and how she manages, falls... and most importantly picks herself up again after those falls.
maureenmccombs's review against another edition
2.0
2.5 This book started off really strong but my the mid-point it had lost its focus and by the end I am not sure the author had any idea what was going on. The descriptive atmosphere was excellently executed, but the characters were a bit flat. The main character, who starts the book with such promise, turns into a sniveling ninny by the end and was very hard to like because of her indecisiveness. This was required reading for a class, otherwise not one I would have picked up on my own. Lukewarm recommendation for others to read.
heatherrm7's review against another edition
emotional
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
3.0
gulshanbatra's review against another edition
2.0
Coming of age stories are uplifting, enlightening, endearing, sometimes amazing, and often at least worth telling.
Miss New India attempts to be one such story of a girl from a small town in the interior of India, who finds reason and courage to move to a big city to find herself, and make a name and a life as well along the way. The story revolves around Anjali / Angie, who has a somewhat confusing sense of entitlement, that at times seems outright misplaced and sometimes utterly mistaken. She is shown as the sparkle of the small town, she can do no wrong, she can't go wrong, she has big future written all over her cute face... but, of course, life - and reality - can't read all that.
Right away we are shown a girl who has been encouraged to feel good and great about herself, and who is told - repeatedly - at least by her English teacher whom she holds in utmost awe (and infatuation!) that she is destined for the stars and big money and generally making it big, and out of their small town.
That sets the tone of the story. She has some bad encounters in her hometown - and right away you see something is not right.
Not in the story, but in the character of Anjali / Angie - whom you're supposed to believe in, enough to want to follow all the way to the big city, and at least for the rest of the book. She comes across as somewhat shallow, naive, juvenile, self-centered, almost arrogant - in other words, a typical 20-yr old who thinks they are the answer to the world's questions. Except in her case, it is hard to see why would she think that.
Even in Bangalore - where the majority of the story happens, she somehow is fawned over by almost whoever she meets. She is shown as this extremely lucky girl, surrounded by others falling over themselves to help her out and lift her out of whatever hole she has dug herself into.
I happen to have spent a couple of years in Bangalore, a few years after what's depicted in the book. I knew many of the landmarks named - the roads, neighborhoods, the restaurants, the pubs, alleys, offices, the crowds - the sheer teeming millions, public transport- which Angie needs to use but once, IT industry - reading about all that brought back a lot of memories. That made the story almost relatable - but I was struggling to feel any empathy for Angie.
I was discussing this book with my son - who happens to be reading The Last Kids on Earth series, and he says that the main character grows as a character during the books. I realized then that that was my biggest complaint with this story. I told him the book I'm reading - the main character hardly grows all through the book, despite being given many chances by smart, intelligent, cunning and idiotic people all around her. She has a lot of chances to look and learn and grow - but even in the end, she is as much of a dunce and as shallow as she was to begin with.
Granted she develops some sort of courage in that last-but-one chapter for that small skirmish, but it is over literally before it begins, and she goes right back to being full of only herself.
Many of the other characters come across as more empathetic and worth knowing-more-about, and you get glimpses of real ideas and thoughts and people and passions and hard work and even biases and ideals and ideologies - none of which seem to leave a lasting mark on our protagonist.
The most intelligent portions of the story are the ones either about Peter Champion, or where you get to read Dynamo's column in the newspaper.
Agreed - not everyone can be a thinker, an intellectual, creative, constructive, modest, intelligent, smart, likeable, honest, humble, hard-working... but then, with a title like Miss New India, the bar was expected to be at least this high. Why else would she deserve that title? Why else would she be representative of the masses? There is a lot of hard work, constant toiling, endless late-night shifts, adjustments, criticisms, insults even, and of course cutthroat competition that is Bangalore. The city has not been built by chance or easily. It is not easy to make it in that city or in that industry. I know - I was there once.
Clearly, not for Anjali / Angie.
2/5 only for the authenticity of the locales, the times, the situations, the people - except Anjali/Angie herself.
Miss New India attempts to be one such story of a girl from a small town in the interior of India, who finds reason and courage to move to a big city to find herself, and make a name and a life as well along the way. The story revolves around Anjali / Angie, who has a somewhat confusing sense of entitlement, that at times seems outright misplaced and sometimes utterly mistaken. She is shown as the sparkle of the small town, she can do no wrong, she can't go wrong, she has big future written all over her cute face... but, of course, life - and reality - can't read all that.
Right away we are shown a girl who has been encouraged to feel good and great about herself, and who is told - repeatedly - at least by her English teacher whom she holds in utmost awe (and infatuation!) that she is destined for the stars and big money and generally making it big, and out of their small town.
That sets the tone of the story. She has some bad encounters in her hometown - and right away you see something is not right.
Not in the story, but in the character of Anjali / Angie - whom you're supposed to believe in, enough to want to follow all the way to the big city, and at least for the rest of the book. She comes across as somewhat shallow, naive, juvenile, self-centered, almost arrogant - in other words, a typical 20-yr old who thinks they are the answer to the world's questions. Except in her case, it is hard to see why would she think that.
Even in Bangalore - where the majority of the story happens, she somehow is fawned over by almost whoever she meets. She is shown as this extremely lucky girl, surrounded by others falling over themselves to help her out and lift her out of whatever hole she has dug herself into.
I happen to have spent a couple of years in Bangalore, a few years after what's depicted in the book. I knew many of the landmarks named - the roads, neighborhoods, the restaurants, the pubs, alleys, offices, the crowds - the sheer teeming millions, public transport- which Angie needs to use but once, IT industry - reading about all that brought back a lot of memories. That made the story almost relatable - but I was struggling to feel any empathy for Angie.
I was discussing this book with my son - who happens to be reading The Last Kids on Earth series, and he says that the main character grows as a character during the books. I realized then that that was my biggest complaint with this story. I told him the book I'm reading - the main character hardly grows all through the book, despite being given many chances by smart, intelligent, cunning and idiotic people all around her. She has a lot of chances to look and learn and grow - but even in the end, she is as much of a dunce and as shallow as she was to begin with.
Granted she develops some sort of courage in that last-but-one chapter for that small skirmish, but it is over literally before it begins, and she goes right back to being full of only herself.
Many of the other characters come across as more empathetic and worth knowing-more-about, and you get glimpses of real ideas and thoughts and people and passions and hard work and even biases and ideals and ideologies - none of which seem to leave a lasting mark on our protagonist.
The most intelligent portions of the story are the ones either about Peter Champion, or where you get to read Dynamo's column in the newspaper.
Agreed - not everyone can be a thinker, an intellectual, creative, constructive, modest, intelligent, smart, likeable, honest, humble, hard-working... but then, with a title like Miss New India, the bar was expected to be at least this high. Why else would she deserve that title? Why else would she be representative of the masses? There is a lot of hard work, constant toiling, endless late-night shifts, adjustments, criticisms, insults even, and of course cutthroat competition that is Bangalore. The city has not been built by chance or easily. It is not easy to make it in that city or in that industry. I know - I was there once.
Clearly, not for Anjali / Angie.
2/5 only for the authenticity of the locales, the times, the situations, the people - except Anjali/Angie herself.
emeraldgreen's review against another edition
3.0
Notes:
anything that teased out infinity.
And yet his influence hangs over some of us like the vault of heaven.
He went to villages and recorded long litanies of anecdotal history, family memories verging on fantasy, and, especially, local songs. (Note: What a rich life!)
The conventional form of Indian femininity projects itself through long-lashed, kohl-rimmed, startled black eyes. Modest women know to glance upward from a slightly bowed head. (Note: lol this is kinda true but also so 90s I don't think anyone in our generation knows how to do this Or maybe we all do an dare just waiting to take off our shells of modern hood?)
the dense clutter of handcarts and bicycles: swollen, restless India on the move.
But not like typical Indian students, those driven rote learners with one obsessive goal: admission to an Indian Institute of Technology.
Family weddings and funerals are the incontestable duties and rituals of Indian life.
Even at nineteen, Anjali was determined not to yield her right to happiness.
“What you wear, how you talk, no wonder! What good boy is going to look twice?”(Note: Oops who needed good boys anyway But omg this is so true)
"Why do you look at people's eyes" Whee am I suppose to look their feet!?
You’ll have kids and a husband who’s jealous of your intelligence and your English and won’t let you out of the house, and that would break my heart.”
Anjali was tuned in to her culture’s consolations for the denial of autonomy.
pleasure? How can you move ahead when all your energy is spent looking over your shoulder? They would never make progress; they were
boys in white shirts with secure prospects in a moribund bureaucracy.
It was not the proper time for Anjali to bring up the known fact that sex determination is male-linked.
negotiation, a girl has a hundred ways of disappointing, then it’s tumble, tumble down a hole or worse, like Alice in Wonderland.
school grades too high (potentially showing too much personal ambition)
But she trusted the boy; he wouldn’t laugh at her.Read more at location
His tone was offhand, conversational, as though Claude Monet and his weird cathedral in a town in France were the subject of everyone’s light-hearted conversation.
but at that precise moment she was still suspended between here and there, between now and then, and Rabi snapped the picture. Years later, people would say that it made a beautiful composition, enigmatic, Mona Lisa–like.
and no one had ever spoken to her about the nature of truth or art, or assumed she cared or knew anything about it.
Truths were handed down from the beginning of time and they held true forever, not for one five-hundredth of a second.
he had learned a Russian word, Chekhovian, from something he’d said about the Indian social and political
She was luminous and mysterious, a synthetic bonbon of indeterminate age. Shaky was a master of light and shadow.
Peter Champion gulped them both down before tearing two sheets off a notebook he carried in his
she simply could not imagine carrying on civilized discourse with anyone from Asansol.
was like voluntarily entering a black hole, especially the black hole of central India called Madhya Pradesh,
could have sat anywhere took the aisle seat next to her and almost immediately put his hand over her breast, as though he owned it, as though it was something he’d bought along with his
no questions and requested no favors—posed, in fact, as a tourist on the model of an Indo-American
helper. If hell and all the citizens of damnation had an Indian address, it was here. If
The numb certitudes of her life: I have no family. The only money in my pocket comes from a man whose world is alien to mine and whom I’ll never see again. I have no job, no skills. School teaches little.Read more at location 1120 • Delete this highlight
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Five hundred and sixty more kilometers to go. Two thousand kilometers behind her.Read more at location 1127 • Delete this highlight
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She, so proud of her Hindi and English and even, if pushed, her Bangla, had been struck deaf and dumb.Read more at location 1134 • Delete this highlight
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Mechanical cranes controlled by a single man, not the long lines of women and children tipping their small bowls of concrete.Read more at location 1145 • Delete this highlight
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novel by a southern writer named Narayan, set in a village—Malgudi, the writer called it—probablyRead more at location 1155 • Delete this highlight
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So, who was responsible for something as roaringly capitalistic as Bangalore?Read more at location 1159 • Delete this highlight
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and through the crack-of-dawn mayhem caused by rural India assaulting the city.Read more at location 1173 • Delete this highlight
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Another MG Road. Peter Champion once said, “Every American town has its Main, Oak, and Elm, just like India has its Gandhi-Nehru-Shastri.”Read more at location 1228 • Delete this highlight
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A gaggle of voices floated down to her, tinkly voices of hyperconfident breakfasters, chattering in American English. Finally, a languageRead more at location 1248 • Delete this highlight
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with familiar cadences! SheRead more at location 1249 • Delete this highlight
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Suzie. “I don’t know why they let those guys into the States. University of Illinois used toRead more at location 1332 • Delete this highlight
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have some class. I keep hoping I get him—he won’t have the balls to call back again.” Mike started singing, “I get no kick from Champagne.” He had a surprising voice: deep, American. “Mukky Sharma lives in Champaign.” “Well, no wonder he’s crazy,” Angie said, “living in Champagne!”Read more at location 1333 • Delete this highlight
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Mickey?’ What he really wants to know is, what’s the weather like in Bangalore today? What’s playing at the Galaxy? Do we still hang out at Forum? What about Styx or Pub World?Read more at location 1344 • Delete this highlight
Note: Lol that mall! I've been there Edit
skimps on comforts and counts only the rupees in her pocketbook and not the dreams inside herRead more at location 1396 • Delete this highlight
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Let the story line of her life write itself! Like a typical Bollywood heroine—the eternal innocent, the trusting small-town girl placing herself at the mercy of a confident, benevolent older man—she climbed into the stranger’s car. She’d seen this movie a hundred times.Read more at location 1407 • Delete this highlight
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He’d taken off for Bangalore because making it here meant making it anywhere in the world.Read more at location 1460 • Delete this highlight
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“Those are things known only in Bangalore. We have the building codes for every city in the world. We have ecological surveys and subsoil analysesRead more at location 1471 • Delete this highlight
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So he inspects buildings that aren’t there, in cities he’s never been to.Read more at location 1478 • Delete this highlight
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His explanation was that the original builders and later occupiers had refused to believe—or perhaps had known only too well—that they would never see England again.Read more at location 1547 • Delete this highlight
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Anjali visualized the developers as vultures circling a dying cow. No room for sentimentality in this city, she realized.Read more at location 1572 • Delete this highlight
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A job is the key to happiness, she calculated. A job brings respect and power. Money brings transformation. Stagnation creates doubt and tyranny. Money transforms a girl from Gauripur into a woman from Bangalore.Read more at location 1601 • Delete this highlight
Note: Isn't this literally the neoliberal feminist idea, though? Edit
Everything seemed secondhand, even the air. Yet she sensed that every object had once held immense value. For some reason she was suddenly reminded of Peter Champion’s words: every note a symphony.Read more at location 1620 • Delete this highlight
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but he described himself as an iconoclast. “Break your feudal habit of revering masters and elders,”Read more at location 1803 • Delete this highlight
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You could run away from home, but not from the rituals of family.Read more at location 1858 • Delete this highlight
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suffered. She saw her parents still cowering and still recovering from the scars of colonialism and the dazzling new Bangalore as a city of total amnesia.Read more at location 2029 • Delete this highlight
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outsourcing. I wish the prosperity was rooted to something. I wish it built something beyond glass monuments. It seems as flimsy as a kite or a balloon. What comes drifting in with the winds might just as easily drift away.”Read more at location 2319 • Delete this highlight
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Right then and there Anjali fell in love with Mr. GG. He was soRead more at location 2348 • Delete this highlight
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But Mr. GG cut through Minnie’s veils of nonsensical nostalgia and poor Mr. Champion’s middle-aged missionary zeal, and he presented a future she longedRead more at location 2349 • Delete this highlight
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“That’s it. We’re soldiers in a social revolution.”Read more at location 2382 • Delete this highlight
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She’d grown up with chaos masquerading as coherence.Read more at location 2520 • Delete this highlight
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Bollywood has no use for India’s women, apart from ornamentation.Read more at location 2707 • Delete this highlight
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Bose, 1 Kew Gardens, as well as sign into the logbook; took her visitor’s badge out of the guard’s hand; and clippedRead more at location 2984 • Delete this highlight
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She suddenly wondered if Indians born and raised in America, Rabi Chatterjee, for instance, lost that ability to identify ethnicity just by looking at an Indian face.Read more at location 3050 • Delete this highlight
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“I am in love. With Bangalore.”Read more at location 3156 • Delete this highlight
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“Appearances can be deceiving,” he said, smiling. “I trust in only the durability of the virtual universe.”Read more at location 3178 • Delete this highlight
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Park. She was a woman with a phone and a glow from being in love with love.Read more at location 3197 • Delete this highlight
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and she realized she wasn’t safe at all.Read more at location 3213 • Delete this highlight
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Things move slowly, like glaciers, until they erupt like tsunamis.Read more at location 3224 • Delete this highlight
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it might as well be to a well-established man who saved me and performed favors and kindnesses. A well-connected man who would owe me. ARead more at location 3233 • Delete this highlight
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ghost women, spidery thin, fighting each other for access to the drivers, and she hated the price of being a woman, and India, and every man she’d ever known.Read more at location 3241 • Delete this highlight
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Maybe all the men in white shirts she passed on the streets had been doing the same thing aRead more at location 3269 • Delete this highlight
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far. She wanted him to keep talking, keep driving, keep lusting. She wanted to love even more than to be loved.Read more at location 3285 • Delete this highlight
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Could the teacher include a lesson in optimism enhancement?Read more at location 3325 • Delete this highlight
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The TV episodes depressed her.Read more at location 3363 • Delete this highlight
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dollars. Insofar as reality can be composedRead more at location 3388 • Delete this highlight
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of raw data, Anjali had created Rock City. The rest of her virtual life was inspiredRead more at location 3389 • Delete this highlight
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Her crime was that of constant, heedless wanting; wanting too much; wanting more of everything, especially happiness.Read more at location 3727 • Delete this highlight
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To a trust-fund Californian photographer who played at slumming, life in India might be all light and angle, but if you are an overreaching penniless Bihari, the light is murky, the angles knife sharp.Read more at location 3743 • Delete this highlight
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copies. I am just a copy. InRead more at location 3775 • Delete this highlight
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You think you’re moving forward, you think you’re beginning to figure things out, and it’s all a trap.Read more at location 3781 • Delete this highlight
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Her father dreaded—had dreaded—looking foolish.Read more at location 3832 • Delete this highlight
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and insisted that only his wife could cook rice perfectly. Read more at location 3993
Note: Ugh men why do patriarchal Edit
Their homes and their neighborhood would reflect the best of the West they’d grown rich in and the romanticized best of the country they’d abandoned as ambitious young men.Read more at location 4009 • Delete this highlight
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freshness before haggling over the price with a fishmonger. Curried Read more at location 4043
Note: She's still so guilty Edit
She’d never felt so comfortable with a boy. Why can’t we get what we most want in the world?Read more at location 4059 • Delete this highlight
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“I’m jealous of anyone in love. Even more jealous of anyone loved back.”Read more at location 4067 • Delete this highlight
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you still dream of meeting someone who’s fallen in love with you for something you’ve written or painted, something you’ve created.Read more at location 4075 • Delete this highlight
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“It’s revolutionized my art!” Then, conspiratorially, “We could always arrange his drowning. The crocs know their business.”Read more at location 4089 • Delete this highlight
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“No holing up,” Parvati snapped. “We have opinions too.”Read more at location 4106 • Delete this highlight
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Theirs was a struggle—lost, in Baba’s case—against communalism and caste-ism and poverty and superstition and too much religion.Read more at location 4357 • Delete this highlight
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What a sad, pathetic thing it is, a man’s cry for what? Favors? Companionship? His private little prostitute?Read more at location 4368 • Delete this highlight
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unending dedication to duty, duty, duty. No mention of joy, fulfillment,Read more at location 4458 • Delete this highlight
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or happiness—it’s heroic.Read more at location 4459 • Delete this highlight
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The tears were for Peter, who still cared for his protégée, and for her father, who, in his clumsy way, had cared too much for the rebel daughter.Read more at location 4486 • Delete this highlight
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Let Citibank Srinivasan aim for nirvana; she was happy to be mired in maya.Read more at location 4506 • Delete this highlight
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“Who needs the mafia,” Auro joked, “when you’ve got an Indian extended family?”Read more at location 4518 • Delete this highlight
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The best I can come up with is you’re like a reflecting pool. You give back wavy clues to what we are or what we’re going to be.”Read more at location 4566 • Delete this highlight
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She had a sudden thought: Nothing bad can come of this. I’m down to one iron in the fire. Debt-recovery agent. If anything is to come of this night, or the future, she thought before turning in, I owe it to bats and crocodiles. How to explain the wonders of this world?Read more at location 4619 • Delete this highlight
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anything that teased out infinity.
And yet his influence hangs over some of us like the vault of heaven.
He went to villages and recorded long litanies of anecdotal history, family memories verging on fantasy, and, especially, local songs. (Note: What a rich life!)
The conventional form of Indian femininity projects itself through long-lashed, kohl-rimmed, startled black eyes. Modest women know to glance upward from a slightly bowed head. (Note: lol this is kinda true but also so 90s I don't think anyone in our generation knows how to do this Or maybe we all do an dare just waiting to take off our shells of modern hood?)
the dense clutter of handcarts and bicycles: swollen, restless India on the move.
But not like typical Indian students, those driven rote learners with one obsessive goal: admission to an Indian Institute of Technology.
Family weddings and funerals are the incontestable duties and rituals of Indian life.
Even at nineteen, Anjali was determined not to yield her right to happiness.
“What you wear, how you talk, no wonder! What good boy is going to look twice?”(Note: Oops who needed good boys anyway But omg this is so true)
"Why do you look at people's eyes" Whee am I suppose to look their feet!?
You’ll have kids and a husband who’s jealous of your intelligence and your English and won’t let you out of the house, and that would break my heart.”
Anjali was tuned in to her culture’s consolations for the denial of autonomy.
pleasure? How can you move ahead when all your energy is spent looking over your shoulder? They would never make progress; they were
boys in white shirts with secure prospects in a moribund bureaucracy.
It was not the proper time for Anjali to bring up the known fact that sex determination is male-linked.
negotiation, a girl has a hundred ways of disappointing, then it’s tumble, tumble down a hole or worse, like Alice in Wonderland.
school grades too high (potentially showing too much personal ambition)
But she trusted the boy; he wouldn’t laugh at her.Read more at location
His tone was offhand, conversational, as though Claude Monet and his weird cathedral in a town in France were the subject of everyone’s light-hearted conversation.
but at that precise moment she was still suspended between here and there, between now and then, and Rabi snapped the picture. Years later, people would say that it made a beautiful composition, enigmatic, Mona Lisa–like.
and no one had ever spoken to her about the nature of truth or art, or assumed she cared or knew anything about it.
Truths were handed down from the beginning of time and they held true forever, not for one five-hundredth of a second.
he had learned a Russian word, Chekhovian, from something he’d said about the Indian social and political
She was luminous and mysterious, a synthetic bonbon of indeterminate age. Shaky was a master of light and shadow.
Peter Champion gulped them both down before tearing two sheets off a notebook he carried in his
she simply could not imagine carrying on civilized discourse with anyone from Asansol.
was like voluntarily entering a black hole, especially the black hole of central India called Madhya Pradesh,
could have sat anywhere took the aisle seat next to her and almost immediately put his hand over her breast, as though he owned it, as though it was something he’d bought along with his
no questions and requested no favors—posed, in fact, as a tourist on the model of an Indo-American
helper. If hell and all the citizens of damnation had an Indian address, it was here. If
The numb certitudes of her life: I have no family. The only money in my pocket comes from a man whose world is alien to mine and whom I’ll never see again. I have no job, no skills. School teaches little.Read more at location 1120 • Delete this highlight
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Five hundred and sixty more kilometers to go. Two thousand kilometers behind her.Read more at location 1127 • Delete this highlight
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She, so proud of her Hindi and English and even, if pushed, her Bangla, had been struck deaf and dumb.Read more at location 1134 • Delete this highlight
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Mechanical cranes controlled by a single man, not the long lines of women and children tipping their small bowls of concrete.Read more at location 1145 • Delete this highlight
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novel by a southern writer named Narayan, set in a village—Malgudi, the writer called it—probablyRead more at location 1155 • Delete this highlight
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So, who was responsible for something as roaringly capitalistic as Bangalore?Read more at location 1159 • Delete this highlight
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and through the crack-of-dawn mayhem caused by rural India assaulting the city.Read more at location 1173 • Delete this highlight
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Another MG Road. Peter Champion once said, “Every American town has its Main, Oak, and Elm, just like India has its Gandhi-Nehru-Shastri.”Read more at location 1228 • Delete this highlight
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A gaggle of voices floated down to her, tinkly voices of hyperconfident breakfasters, chattering in American English. Finally, a languageRead more at location 1248 • Delete this highlight
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with familiar cadences! SheRead more at location 1249 • Delete this highlight
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Suzie. “I don’t know why they let those guys into the States. University of Illinois used toRead more at location 1332 • Delete this highlight
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have some class. I keep hoping I get him—he won’t have the balls to call back again.” Mike started singing, “I get no kick from Champagne.” He had a surprising voice: deep, American. “Mukky Sharma lives in Champaign.” “Well, no wonder he’s crazy,” Angie said, “living in Champagne!”Read more at location 1333 • Delete this highlight
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Mickey?’ What he really wants to know is, what’s the weather like in Bangalore today? What’s playing at the Galaxy? Do we still hang out at Forum? What about Styx or Pub World?Read more at location 1344 • Delete this highlight
Note: Lol that mall! I've been there Edit
skimps on comforts and counts only the rupees in her pocketbook and not the dreams inside herRead more at location 1396 • Delete this highlight
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Let the story line of her life write itself! Like a typical Bollywood heroine—the eternal innocent, the trusting small-town girl placing herself at the mercy of a confident, benevolent older man—she climbed into the stranger’s car. She’d seen this movie a hundred times.Read more at location 1407 • Delete this highlight
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He’d taken off for Bangalore because making it here meant making it anywhere in the world.Read more at location 1460 • Delete this highlight
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“Those are things known only in Bangalore. We have the building codes for every city in the world. We have ecological surveys and subsoil analysesRead more at location 1471 • Delete this highlight
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So he inspects buildings that aren’t there, in cities he’s never been to.Read more at location 1478 • Delete this highlight
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His explanation was that the original builders and later occupiers had refused to believe—or perhaps had known only too well—that they would never see England again.Read more at location 1547 • Delete this highlight
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Anjali visualized the developers as vultures circling a dying cow. No room for sentimentality in this city, she realized.Read more at location 1572 • Delete this highlight
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A job is the key to happiness, she calculated. A job brings respect and power. Money brings transformation. Stagnation creates doubt and tyranny. Money transforms a girl from Gauripur into a woman from Bangalore.Read more at location 1601 • Delete this highlight
Note: Isn't this literally the neoliberal feminist idea, though? Edit
Everything seemed secondhand, even the air. Yet she sensed that every object had once held immense value. For some reason she was suddenly reminded of Peter Champion’s words: every note a symphony.Read more at location 1620 • Delete this highlight
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but he described himself as an iconoclast. “Break your feudal habit of revering masters and elders,”Read more at location 1803 • Delete this highlight
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You could run away from home, but not from the rituals of family.Read more at location 1858 • Delete this highlight
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suffered. She saw her parents still cowering and still recovering from the scars of colonialism and the dazzling new Bangalore as a city of total amnesia.Read more at location 2029 • Delete this highlight
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outsourcing. I wish the prosperity was rooted to something. I wish it built something beyond glass monuments. It seems as flimsy as a kite or a balloon. What comes drifting in with the winds might just as easily drift away.”Read more at location 2319 • Delete this highlight
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Right then and there Anjali fell in love with Mr. GG. He was soRead more at location 2348 • Delete this highlight
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But Mr. GG cut through Minnie’s veils of nonsensical nostalgia and poor Mr. Champion’s middle-aged missionary zeal, and he presented a future she longedRead more at location 2349 • Delete this highlight
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“That’s it. We’re soldiers in a social revolution.”Read more at location 2382 • Delete this highlight
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She’d grown up with chaos masquerading as coherence.Read more at location 2520 • Delete this highlight
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Bollywood has no use for India’s women, apart from ornamentation.Read more at location 2707 • Delete this highlight
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Bose, 1 Kew Gardens, as well as sign into the logbook; took her visitor’s badge out of the guard’s hand; and clippedRead more at location 2984 • Delete this highlight
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She suddenly wondered if Indians born and raised in America, Rabi Chatterjee, for instance, lost that ability to identify ethnicity just by looking at an Indian face.Read more at location 3050 • Delete this highlight
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“I am in love. With Bangalore.”Read more at location 3156 • Delete this highlight
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“Appearances can be deceiving,” he said, smiling. “I trust in only the durability of the virtual universe.”Read more at location 3178 • Delete this highlight
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Park. She was a woman with a phone and a glow from being in love with love.Read more at location 3197 • Delete this highlight
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and she realized she wasn’t safe at all.Read more at location 3213 • Delete this highlight
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Things move slowly, like glaciers, until they erupt like tsunamis.Read more at location 3224 • Delete this highlight
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it might as well be to a well-established man who saved me and performed favors and kindnesses. A well-connected man who would owe me. ARead more at location 3233 • Delete this highlight
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ghost women, spidery thin, fighting each other for access to the drivers, and she hated the price of being a woman, and India, and every man she’d ever known.Read more at location 3241 • Delete this highlight
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Maybe all the men in white shirts she passed on the streets had been doing the same thing aRead more at location 3269 • Delete this highlight
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far. She wanted him to keep talking, keep driving, keep lusting. She wanted to love even more than to be loved.Read more at location 3285 • Delete this highlight
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Could the teacher include a lesson in optimism enhancement?Read more at location 3325 • Delete this highlight
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The TV episodes depressed her.Read more at location 3363 • Delete this highlight
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dollars. Insofar as reality can be composedRead more at location 3388 • Delete this highlight
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of raw data, Anjali had created Rock City. The rest of her virtual life was inspiredRead more at location 3389 • Delete this highlight
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Her crime was that of constant, heedless wanting; wanting too much; wanting more of everything, especially happiness.Read more at location 3727 • Delete this highlight
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To a trust-fund Californian photographer who played at slumming, life in India might be all light and angle, but if you are an overreaching penniless Bihari, the light is murky, the angles knife sharp.Read more at location 3743 • Delete this highlight
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copies. I am just a copy. InRead more at location 3775 • Delete this highlight
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You think you’re moving forward, you think you’re beginning to figure things out, and it’s all a trap.Read more at location 3781 • Delete this highlight
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Her father dreaded—had dreaded—looking foolish.Read more at location 3832 • Delete this highlight
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and insisted that only his wife could cook rice perfectly. Read more at location 3993
Note: Ugh men why do patriarchal Edit
Their homes and their neighborhood would reflect the best of the West they’d grown rich in and the romanticized best of the country they’d abandoned as ambitious young men.Read more at location 4009 • Delete this highlight
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freshness before haggling over the price with a fishmonger. Curried Read more at location 4043
Note: She's still so guilty Edit
She’d never felt so comfortable with a boy. Why can’t we get what we most want in the world?Read more at location 4059 • Delete this highlight
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“I’m jealous of anyone in love. Even more jealous of anyone loved back.”Read more at location 4067 • Delete this highlight
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you still dream of meeting someone who’s fallen in love with you for something you’ve written or painted, something you’ve created.Read more at location 4075 • Delete this highlight
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“It’s revolutionized my art!” Then, conspiratorially, “We could always arrange his drowning. The crocs know their business.”Read more at location 4089 • Delete this highlight
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“No holing up,” Parvati snapped. “We have opinions too.”Read more at location 4106 • Delete this highlight
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Theirs was a struggle—lost, in Baba’s case—against communalism and caste-ism and poverty and superstition and too much religion.Read more at location 4357 • Delete this highlight
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What a sad, pathetic thing it is, a man’s cry for what? Favors? Companionship? His private little prostitute?Read more at location 4368 • Delete this highlight
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unending dedication to duty, duty, duty. No mention of joy, fulfillment,Read more at location 4458 • Delete this highlight
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or happiness—it’s heroic.Read more at location 4459 • Delete this highlight
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The tears were for Peter, who still cared for his protégée, and for her father, who, in his clumsy way, had cared too much for the rebel daughter.Read more at location 4486 • Delete this highlight
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Let Citibank Srinivasan aim for nirvana; she was happy to be mired in maya.Read more at location 4506 • Delete this highlight
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“Who needs the mafia,” Auro joked, “when you’ve got an Indian extended family?”Read more at location 4518 • Delete this highlight
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The best I can come up with is you’re like a reflecting pool. You give back wavy clues to what we are or what we’re going to be.”Read more at location 4566 • Delete this highlight
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She had a sudden thought: Nothing bad can come of this. I’m down to one iron in the fire. Debt-recovery agent. If anything is to come of this night, or the future, she thought before turning in, I owe it to bats and crocodiles. How to explain the wonders of this world?Read more at location 4619 • Delete this highlight
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