"India remains a mystery to many Americans, even as it is poised to become the worldʼs third largest economy within a generation, outstripping Japan. It will surpass China in population by 2032 and will have more English speakers than the United States by 2050. In In Spite of the Gods, Edward Luce, a journalist who covered India for many years, makes brilliant sense of India and its rise to global power. Already a number-one bestseller in India, his book is sure to be acknowledged for years as the definitive introduction to modern India. In Spite of the Gods illuminates a land of many contradictions. The booming tech sector we read so much about in the West, Luce points out, employs no more than one million of Indiaʼs 1.1 billion people.…
"Like Partition, this story has been much told, but Edward Luce’s account is authoritative, balanced, sensible and enjoyable. If there is a businessman going to India who wants to get a hang of the economics of the country in an accessible form, this is the book, no question. Luce was the Financial Times correspondent, married to an Indian, and really got under the skin of the place, really travelled. And most of all, he can write. A rare combination. I’m a non-economist. I don’t really understand money but he explained it to me most lucidly, more so than any other book. Well, he makes comparison with China, where there is a completely different model of development. The Chinese model is, in a sense, a sort of mass manufacturing – everyone’s making car parks and industrial things. India is a culture in which huge swathes of the workforce are illiterate and so on, yet you’ve got this small, super-clever, over-well-educated, incredibly ambitious middle class who are doing the pernickety bits – the software, the fancy finance, the high-value stuff. But there’s a much smaller proportion of the population who are doing this. So there are these two models of development, and at the moment the Chinese are pulling ahead. They’re educating their people much better. India is always the elephant, you know, moving slowly. But immovable once it gets going. Yes. Even the flagship, Electronics City, outside Bangalore, is more or less impossible to get to. There’s a Sanjeev Bhaskar joke about Bangalore: “Honey, I’m only a mile from home – I’ll be there in six hours!”"
