TheElephant, the Tiger and the Cellphone

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.

For more than four decades after Independence, India was associated with the plodding, somnolent elephant, comfortably resting on its achievements of the centuries gone by. Then, in the early 1990s, the elephant seemed to wake up from its slumber and slowly began to change-until today. Now, some even see it morphing into a tiger. So what does the twenty-first century hold for India? Will it bring the strength of the tiger and the size of an elephant to bear upon the world? Or will it remain just an elephant at heart? In this companion volume to the bestselling India: From Midnight to the Millennium and Beyond, Shashi Tharoor analyses the forces that have made twenty-first-century India-and could yet unmake it.An excellent introduction to an economy and society in transition''What stands out in [Tharoor's] writings is his passionate involvement with India''Not a primer on modern India. Instead, it is a total immersion course'