In Spite of the Gods: The Strange Rise of Modern India | 
| Author: Edward Luce
Publisher: Doubleday
Category: Book
List Price: $26.00
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Avg. Customer Rating:  55 reviews
Sales Rank: 147339
Media: Hardcover
Edition: 1
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 400
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.7
Dimensions (in): 9.3 x 6.2 x 1.3
ISBN: 0385514743
Dewey Decimal Number: 954.053
EAN: 9780385514743
ASIN: 0385514743
Publication Date: January 16, 2007
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Product Description
India remains a mystery to many Americans, even as it is poised to become the world’s 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 India’s 1.1 billion people. Only 35 million people, in fact, have formal enough jobs to pay taxes, while three-quarters of the country lives in extreme deprivation in India’s 600,000 villages. Yet amid all these extremes exists the world’s largest experiment in representative democracy—and a largely successful one, despite bureaucracies riddled with horrifying corruption.
Luce shows that India is an economic rival to the U.S. in an entirely different sense than China is. There is nothing in India like the manufacturing capacity of China, despite the huge potential labor force. An inept system of public education leaves most Indians illiterate and unskilled. Yet at the other extreme, the middle class produces ten times as many engineering students a year as the United States. Notwithstanding its future as a major competitor in a globalized economy, American. leaders have been encouraging India’s rise, even welcoming it into the nuclear energy club, hoping to balance China’s influence in Asia.
Above all, In Spite of the Gods is an enlightening study of the forces shaping India as it tries to balance the stubborn traditions of the past with an unevenly modernizing present. Deeply informed by scholarship and history, leavened by humor and rich in anecdote, it shows that India has huge opportunities as well as tremendous challenges that make the future “hers to lose.”
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 Great primer on what makes India tick June 19, 2008
This is a terrific, highly readable book on the many facets of political, cultural and economic systems in India and how they effect the well being of its people and India's international relations. I knew very little about India and this book was the perfect way to start learning. I highly recommend it. It is extremely interesting and a needed primer considering the growth of India's economy and potential world influence. The comparisions with China are particularly good.
Great perspective - very honest view of India. May 27, 2008
Luce is very candid and honest about the good & bad of India. Good book to read for an "outsiders" (non-Indian) viewpoint.
Great book, good research effort May 7, 2008
This is a good book to read on India's progress in the last 60 years. Ed Luce has conducted a considerable amount of research and interviews.
In the political section Ed does tend to be favorable to Sonia Gandhi, is sympathetic to Muslims in India and is critical of the BJP. Sonia seems to have been critical of the communal violence in Gujarat and that such a thing could not have happened if the Congress was in power. Ed fails to point out that the Punjab riots in the early 80s were created by the Congress.
Personally I would read this book and draw my own conclusions.
Good read, but a curious retitling from the hardback edition May 1, 2008
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
The subtitle of the hardback edition of Edward Luce's work was "The Strange Rise of Modern India." In the paperback, the 'Strange' modifier has been omitted, and I think it was a curious decision by the marketers of this fine effort. Luce takes pains in the introduction to explain the title, dropping terms like "strengths not necessarily located in its religious traditions, " "confounding expectations," the "unusual character of its rise," and the observation that India is succeeding in "expanding rapidly without having undergone a broad-based industrial revolution." But with the 'Strange' modifier left out of the title, there's really nothing for Luce to explain. The original title perfectly captured the spirit and tone of Luce's work. The re-done title is a cop-out or perhaps a bow to some aggrieved constituency.
Indeed, the entire book is dedicated to spotlighting the contradictory and "against the odds" (or, "in spite of the gods") nature of India's rise over the past decades. Luce doesn't introduce the term until the book's conclusion, but he notes there that John Kenneth Galbraith referred to India as "functioning anarchy." Luce places it somewhere between there and a very complex democracy, one with serious, pause-inducing structural shortcomings in, among other things, its labor markets, civil service and political party infrastructure.
Those looking for deep insights into off-shoring, IT, IIT, Bollywood (an included picture of Bollywood superstar Aishwarya Rai is, unfortunately, gratuitous - she's nowhere to be found on these pages), the rise of mega-companies like Mittal and Reliance and various other economic successes should look elsewhere. Luce's beat is mostly political, and he spends the great majority of the time dissecting the various parties and their machinations.
Still, all in all, this is a very good read from this first-rate journalist from the FT. I learned quite a lot.
A 5-star read about the global economy April 12, 2008
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
While most have remained captivated by China's race to be recognized as the next world power, Edward Luce suggests shifting focus to another eastern country: India. In Spite of the Gods substantiates this suggestion.
Qualified to offer this survey after reporting from New Delhi for the Financial Times, Luce draws from both his professional and personal experiences in India to analyze its glaring contradictions, the most striking being India's rise to the world stage as a powerful economic and political force, while the population of India remains deeply religious, spiritual, and often impoverished.
To account for India's current position on the world stage, and likely candidacy for the next world power, Luce stunningly explains for the layperson the history and nature of India's economy. The Indian economy is fueled not by industry but by service. These service sectors combined in recent decades with a growing information technology sector, which immediately placed India within the ranks of the world powers.
Luce does not limit himself to economic analyses, nor to the middle and upper classes. Weaving together history, facts, anecdotes, and interviews from the entire subcontinent, Luce provides such shocking details such as that in Bihar, in northern India, roughly 80 percent of government-subsidized food is stolen. How? Most ration cards must be obtained through bribery, and Indians capable of bribing, are not poor.
Luce's seamless shifting between economics, politics, religion, tradition, and the world stage is useful. By providing various ways through which to interpret modern India, Luce not only allows his reader a breezy catch-up on exactly how India got from there to here, but also demonstrates to his reader how to pull from multiple perspectives when considering India.
Luce's modern history of India avoids romanticizing the country, a trap into which many historians of India have fallen. And his book loses no excitement in this wise aversion; instead, the picture Luce weaves of India is so hopeful that one is inclined to agree not only with his assertion that India is a viable candidate for the next world power, but furthermore that India's rise to world power will add to, rather than threaten, global stability.
Armchair Interviews says: Important message for all interested in our ever-changing global economy.
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