>>Male commentator: Hi everyone, and welcome
to another Google Authors event at the San Francisco office. Today we're very pleased
to welcome Anand Giridharadas who writes for the Currents column for The New York Times
and also the International Herald Tribune. Currents explores fresh ideas, global culture,
and social meaning of technology among other subjects. In 2009, he completed a four and a half year
tour reporting from India for the Times and Herald Tribune as their first Bombay presence
in the modern era. He reported on Indian's transformation, Bollywood, corporate takeovers,
terrorism, outsourcing, poverty, and democracy. Is that, is that all? Did I get every -- [laughter] He was appointed a columnist in 2008 Writing
a Letter From India series, as well. Today he is here to talk about his first book,
India Calling, An Intimate Portrait of a Nation's Remaking, a work of narrative non-fiction
about his return to the India that his parents left. Please welcome to Google, Anand. [applause] [microphone static in background] >>Anand Giridharadas: Thank you, Nick and
thanks to all of you for-for being here. I know competing with Google's food is a very
tough thing to do, so I'm gonna try to compete with what I know is the secret competitive
advantage of this company. [laughter] And I know that because my sister used to
work here and some of you worked with her and so even though she's not here a special
via YouTube thank to her -- [laughter] for making this happen. I wanna really keep about half of our time
together for a discussion so what I'm gonna do is explain a little bit about how I got
to write this book and what it is and then read to you a bit from it. And then we'll
talk. [pause] The origin of my book on India was my encounter
with India through biography. And I grew up in this country in Cleveland, Ohio first and
then Europe and then Washington D.C., as the child of Indian emigrates. And grew up always with this sense that India
was a place that had pushed my parents away and that in my own way as a child I wanted
to continue pushing away. And that is of course common to many immigrant families. But when I was growing up this sense of India
as this kind of remote, stifling, stifled place was very vivid for me and it came first
in my parents' stories, many of which were all about essentially why they left. Stories
that rationalized why they left; stories that kind of sought to make sense of that for themselves
and in the process give my sister and I a picture of what this country was. That picture was compounded by all of the
kind of press coverage and the zeitgeist of what India was for the world in those days
which was a basket case, this third world country or all those labels; some of which
were unfair some of which were fair, but all of which again contributed to this sense of
a country better kept where it was in the mind of a young first-generation child. And then we would actually go to India every
two years or so. And on those visits this kind of vague sense that I had of wanting
to keep this place at bay was deepened by the reality of that contact. And I suppose
it was partly growing up in this country which more than any other country gives people the
feeling of head room and of being able to become whatever they wanna be and fulfill
their potential and fulfill their dreams, that India felt so profoundly different from
that in those days. It felt above all, a place where people had
so much potential within [microphone static in background] them they had the resources
of a great civilization behind them and, is that mine? No. And at the same time there was this feeling
of, I'm sorry let me just [laughter] There was this feeling of so much intelligence
and possibility locked up in people. Women who had a lot to say but didn't say it if
there were people who weren't women around. Children who had brilliant ideas in their
head and heads full of kind of notes, but who didn't feel as comfortable speaking in
the presence of adults. The poverty,the child beggars who I saw who looked eerily like me,
and I wasn't used to seeing children who looked like me in this country. And all of those
things fed a certain picture of India that had estranged me from it over those years. And I tell you that background because when
I was graduating from college in 2003, for a set of reasons I wanted to be a writer and
I thought maybe I should just go somewhere interesting in the world and kind of become
a writer through collision with the unfamiliar. I chose India as the site of the unfamiliar
and I chose to just to go, not because I had changed my mind or because I love it at that
point, but because the idea of shocking myself a little bit seemed to me the way you actually
become a writer. And I had no idea how to become a writer so it was just a kind of a
guess. And I went and I was shocked, but I was shocked
by something that I didn't expect to be shocked by. I was shocked by the many ways in which
the picture that I had of India, the picture that I had maintained growing up, was now
outdated. And I was shocked by the fact that India was very palpably on the way to becoming
another kind of country. And the very thing that had most estranged
me from it, the sense that kind of the purpose of life is to accept and be content and this
kind of serene acceptance of life as it merely is, was giving way to a very different national
spirit. It didn't mean everybody was rich overnight,
it didn't mean poverty had been eliminated, it didn't mean all these material things had
changed, but the spirit of the country had clearly rotated and become a spirit of grabbing
life by the horns, changing your destiny, reinventing yourself. And a new and growing
generation of young Indians no longer had to leave to reinvent themselves as fully and
abundantly as they did when they became immigrants and pursued that kind of reinvention. So what I've set out to do in the book is
to tell the story in my own very personal way of how that India became this India. What
was that India that my parents left? What was Indianness within it? What did it mean
to be Indian in that world? And then how did that change? And I've tried to do so no through a lot of
the structural kind of economic things a lot of people talk about when they talk about
India and China, this kind of GDP and growing economy and urbanization, all these kind of
big forces. These are important things, but my sense of
what most was changing in India was human things: people's conception of the purpose
of life, of the purpose of their relations with other people, of their embeddedness in
the community. These very core elemental things, the things that novels tend to explore rather
than non-fiction books. Those were the things that were most changing in my reportage. And so the chapters of the book explore different
states of minds. The chapters are Dreams, Ambition, Pride, Anger, Love, Freedom, and
then an epilogue called Midnight. And each of them seeks to explore. In Ambition,
for example, you have a country with huge, extraordinary underclass. India has many more
poor people than sub-Saharan Africa today, for example, something that most people don't
talk about. But even among that underclass it is very
clear if you spend time with people on the farms, for example, that people are now rejecting
the idea that that's all that they can be. And you find a lot of farmers' children who
suddenly say, "I refuse to be a farmer." Now they don't necessarily know what step two
is, but they've broken a chain in their minds of saying, "This is what my grandfather was,
this is what I am, this is what I have to be." [pause] You also then see in the Pride chapter that
it's not just this kind of economic rise and these people rising up financially, there's
a growing cultural confidence in India, a growing pride in being Indian that comes with
growth. And a previous generation of elites was very
much like the British who left India in 1947, dressed in the same ways, spoke in the same
ways, have British accents, love to have high tea. And one of the major shifts underway in India
is the replacement of that class of elites or at least the expansion of the world of
elites to include many people who are not British seeming, who dress and think and talk
and reason and read books that are of Indian origin and that are much more deeply rooted
in the soil. And then there are changes in the very private
world of family. One of the things that I talk about in the book is how love is changing
in India and there's a real kind of Romeo and Juliet revolution that's going on. Now the reason I say Romeo and Juliet is when
Shakespeare wrote that play the reason it was quite a hit was that it was a subversive
idea at that time. At that time even in the West the reason you married was for family
pragmatics, and marriage was a kind of M & A activity and you kind of two families came
together and their property interests were aligned and it made sense and everybody was
kind of on board. And what Shakespeare chronicled was the rise
of this other idea which is that love actually matters more. If two people love each other
then you make everything else work around that, and that was a shift in Western society. And India is going through that shift today
where this idea of love mattering more than all those other considerations is kind of
pushing its way in. And so I talk in the book about a young woman who's wrestling with that
pushing in. And I spend time in a divorce court in India,
I spend a week in a divorce court seeing how in a way this new idea of love is also bringing
with it a certain fragility to these marriages, because these new marriages are much more
loving but they gamble everything on the presence, continued presence of that love. They're not
held together by family ties and economics and everything else. They're just held together
by love and they break much more easily than the old kind of marriage. And final example, chapter on Freedom is about
what is happening to family in this modernization journey. And we often think about, if you
asked many Indians what's changed between then and now, they will share this narrative
of India being a kind of more restrained, stifled place and now a place where people
can flower and fulfill their potential more. But people generally in India tend to blame
things like the old economy, socialism, poverty, and all of those things are true. One thing
that you don't hear said in India but that I'm very clear from my work made a difference,
was that family which is something that Indians celebrate about themselves was as much a source
of the limitation on human potential. It did many good things and it also did many bad
things. And family was, I certainly know more people whose potential was curtailed by family
than was curtailed by socialist economic policies. People who start with the half of the population
that is women, but you can go far beyond women. There's a style of raising children traditionally
in India that did not say, "Who are you? What's your inner potentiality, go find it," that
instead said, "Sit here, don't sit there. Drink that, don't drink this. Study this,
don't study that." And that slowly caused a lot of people to wither. And now, a new idea of family is coming to
India and a new style of raising children that allows that flowering and that creates
a whole new series of problems. So those are the kinds of changes I sought
to chronicle, and now I'd like to read to you from two different passages of the book. The first is from the very beginning and kind
of captures where I was when I first arrived in this bewildering new country, trying to
figure it out. And before I kind of had seen all this change, the first thing I saw was
linguistic confusion. You arrive and everybody seems to be speaking
English, but then you realize Indian English is like a whole different language all its
own. For example, I was working at a consulting
firm at the time and kept using this phrase S and M. And it took me a very long time to
realize that this was sales and marketing which is considerably more benign than what
I imagined. [laughter] So I'll read to you from this passage about
linguistic confusion. "The most mystical new concept though was
native place, which I eventually discovered was the village where my ancestors had most
recently milked cows, even if recent meant the year 1500. 'Ver are you from?' a typical conversation
would begin. 'Washington D.C.' 'Yes, yes, that is okay, but ver are you from?' [laughter] 'America.' 'No, no that is very good. In fact my brother
is in New Jersey, Trenton. I've been to USA, New York and California also, twice. But what
I mean to say is what is your native place?' 'I was born in Cleveland, Ohio in the Midwest.' 'No, no your native place. Basically you are
an Indian only you know.' 'Yes, yes of course.' 'So what is your native place? That only is
what I'm asking.' 'My parents grew up in Bombay.' 'So basically you are a Maharashtrian, but
your name Giridharadas?' 'Actually I'm half Tamil and half Punjabi.' 'Tamil and Punjabi!' my interlocutor would
exclaim eyes bulging at the thought of such brazen regional miscegenation. [laughter] 'But how could that be?' 'They met in Bombay.' 'So basically, basically you are a Punjabi
correct?' [laughter] 'Well.' 'Basically your father is a Punjabi?' 'No my mother is Punjabi.' 'Okay, I see, I see. So your father is a South
Indian?' 'Exactly.' 'Okay, okay, okay.' Pause. Relief. The pigeon had been pigeonholed. 'So basically speaking you are a South Indian?' 'Sure, whatever you want.'" [laughter] [pause] So that was the initial encounter with India,
and six years later I, as I finished this book, tried to reflect on what I'd taken away
after getting over that initial confusion, and tried to think about what all of this
emotion and energy and dynamism in the new India what it meant. And here's part of that conclusion: [pause] "Our parents' generation still participated
in India from afar. They sent money, advised charities, guided hedge fund dollars into
the Bombay stock exchange, attended emigrate conferences. But many were too implicated
in India to return. To reverse their journey threatened somehow to invalidate the years
spent away. Our generation, bearing less of the past's
baggage, was freer to embrace the India now coming. I had grown up defining myself by
the soil under my feet, not by the blood in my veins. The soil I shared with everyone
else. The blood made me unbearably different. Before I loved India, I loathed it. But the
more India called to me the more that feeling began to seem like a relic from a buried past. And India now called not only to us, its far
scattered seeds, its sharpest call was to its own; to those who had remained and may
once have felt outsmarted by those who left. It summoned them now to seize hold of their
destinies and so they were becoming the unlikely long lost cousins of my parents in America;
restless, ambitious, with dreams vivid only to themselves. In leaving India my parents had beaten the
odds in a bad system. What had changed since they left was a systemic lifting of the odds
for those who stayed. From languorous villages to pulsating cities, Indians were making difficult
new choices, rising to the occasion of history, coming into their own in a thousand ways.
And it was addictive this improbable rush of hope, these many answers of the call. I will never be able to relay the fullness
of what it was to live in India in that dawn. The world turned slowly. Nations, heroes,
visions of regeneration come and go. To history we are ever chained and the new is seldom
as new as it seems. But there are moments sprinkled stingily among the centuries when
fate breaks, when souls open, when the shoreline of the past falls irretrievably into the distance. Nehru spoke eloquently in that midnight in
1947, at the instant when the soul of a nation long suppressed finds utterance. But it took
two more generations to bring utterance not just to that collective soul, but also to
the millions of souls within, one by one by one. That idea first came to me in the dusty lanes
of Umred. It came in meeting Ravindra and in hearing in his voice not just ambition,
not just hope, but also a sublime kind of freedom; a freedom from the definitions of
the past, of his tribe, of rank; a freedom to make himself new. And I wondered how he
judged the freedom that he had found in relation to the freedom that Gandhi and Nehru had won
in 1947. For the world and for many well born Indians
those men were paramount heroes. They had given India a voice; they'd ushered an improbable
country vast, fractured, argumentative into being. But further away from the leading cities that
independence seemed to matter less. In places such as Umred the British had been a faint
presence. The Indians, once they took over, improved little. The landlords, the humiliations,
the smallness of life, it all lived on. What was coming to India now was a sense of
awakening much as it had in 1947. But this time if felt less theoretical. This time if
felt like another kind of independence; an independence of the soul, not just of the
nation. 'If these kinds of things are happening and
continue to happen in the future India will become a real independent country,' Ravindra
said when I put the idea to him one day. 'Today we are independent, no problem. We do not
have anybody's kingdom over us, but still we are not that much free. We are not living
a completely free life today. We need financial freedom which we do not have now. So when
young people come ahead the new generation will come ahead and they will start to live
in the way we're talking about. India will really become independent and we will really
become a superpower. We will not depend on anybody else. We will live the life of our
own dreams.' To live the life of one's own dreams, this
then was a second independence for Ravindra, the coming of a new midnight. That first midnight had expelled an empire,
had resolved the political question of whether Indians could govern themselves, had shown
the world in the person of Gandhi a specially Indian way of melting oppression. And yet so much of the Indian stasis, so much
of what challenged the life that Ravindra sought was not of British provenance and would
not just leave when the colonizers sailed away. The family relations of guilt, the never
questioned rituals, the intricate taxonomy castes and sub-sub-castes, the rural cruelty,
the poverty, these facts would require their own thousand Gandhis; a diffuse army of activists
and entrepreneurs and philosophers and farmers toiling across the land, cutting these other
fetters, stretching the Indian idea of the possible, making if more than lyrical to speak
of a life of one's dreams. That first midnight had anchored Indians in
place, they had lived for so long with smaller allegiances to the tribe, the caste, the faith.
Gandhi returned from South Africa and Nehru returned from Britain, saw a wholeness in
India that many Indians did not see for themselves and through the force of their actions they
made that wholeness a reality. This second midnight was, by contrast, about
the dissolution of place; about returning to another kind of fragmentation. It was a
revolution of quiet refusals to no one's place, geographic place, place in time, place in
the tribe. It celebrated the lightness of being without roots, the possibility of reinvention,
the dignity of anonymity. It brought a kind of independence that 1947 had not brought;
that of not depending on others for the discovery of what you might become." Thank you. [applause] Now I'm happy to take any questions and have
a discussion. [pause] >>Nick: If everyone who asks a question if
you could just come up so we can capture it for YouTube. [pause] >>female #1: Hello. >>Anand Giridharadas: Hi. >>female #1: I wanted to get a better understanding
of what the state of arranged marriages is in India. It's always been very fascinating
to me. I do have some friends in the Hyderabad Google Office and they have their own perspectives
and I know things have changed, but I'm not sure how it is in other areas outside of Hyderabad. >>Anand Giridharadas: In some ways it's a
very good metaphor for tradition in India more generally. What is happening to arranged
marriage is happening to the whole kind of landscape of the old traditional world, which
is there's not one clear picture. So there are places where a simple narrative
of everyone used to have arranged marriages now nobody does, where that it true. There's
certain spaces, certain levels of society, certain geographic areas where you'd see a
very clear shift away from arranged marriage. There are other places where there's almost
no dent in the number of proportion people who have arranged marriages, where tradition
very much is still with us. And then there's a lot of spaces in between. And I think if you think about the new India,
the kinds of people who would actually work at Google Hyderabad, where I've actually been,
so I have a sense of who that demographic is. That demographic is in a way the most
interesting because they are neither this extreme of like they've all rejected tradition
and are totally all having love marriages, nor are they totally traditional for obvious
reasons. And they're on this in between kind of liminal
space where there's a lot of negotiation going on. And what I've found is a lot of those
people who are kind of in that in between zone, are very comfortable with multiple modes
of thinking about modernity and their own identity. And so a lot of people in India are doing
multiple tracks at the same time. Their parents may be looking for them and they're kind of
tolerant of that, they maybe in their [bad audio] as parents and parents' networks. Then
they may be looking on the Internet with their parents. So they're kind of leading the Internet-based
search which is kind of like match.com but it's called shaadi.com. So it's like marriage.com
instead of match.com. And they may be doing that and kind of in the driver's seat but
with parents' help and parents' short listing. And they may be drinking and smoking and hooking
up and doing that also kind of in the Western way. And what's really I think interesting about
Indians, is Indians are agnostic about which of these is better. I think a lot of western
minds feel a compulsion to say, "I'm an arranged marriage kind of person," or "I'm not an arranged
marriage kind of person. Philosophically I'm with that or philosophically I'm not with
that." You find a lot of Indians who are comfortable
doing all of those three things without seeing contradictions between them; just accepting
that these are different things with different kinds of wisdom inherent in them. At least
now, maybe you'll move to an India that everyone's doing love marriage. But I actually don't
think that's the pattern that's gonna emerge even in the future. I think India will continue
to be a place with a kind of both and model of modernization in which kind of different
kinds of truths about what it means to modern are simultaneously present. [pause] >>male #1: Earlier you mentioned how children
of farmers are rejecting their family farms and seeking other opportunities. How are they
becoming aware of these other opportunities and what's your assessment of, is it a rural
to urban migration or your other elements in terms of how they're thinking about leaving
the farming sector? >>Anand Giridharadas: The question of how
people get this awareness is a very important one. And even I can tell you a lot of culprits
that I've seen, but I think in a way it remains for me this kind of big unfinished question.
There's only so much we know about. Something's gotten into the air and there's a million
cues people take in a society for how they should behave and what they should think about
being, and I think it's actually probably millions of different little cues that people
are getting about where the future is, where their possibilities are. The few things that I would say are really
important as forces, probably more important than any other is television. I think if you
think about the backgrounds of most of the people in this room, we probably grew up with
the sense television was not good for us, more television kind of makes you dumb, etcetera,
etcetera, etcetera. When you are at the very beginning of the
development arc and you have very little exposure, your parents are not a useful template for
the kind of people you'd like to become; they're poor, everyone around you is poor, etcetera,
television is this extraordinary and very different kind of force. It's a force of uplift
because it beams into very humble people's living rooms all the possible alternative
existences available to them. And these are people whose parents are not saying, "You
can be an astronaut, you can be a teacher." These are people whose parents are saying,
"Go clean that. Go fix that." And television is in a way an aspiring, aspirational, ambitious,
pushy parent for people who don't have those kinds of parents themselves. And I remember something that Ravindra, who's
a young man who I met in a village, in a kind of very poor background but rose up; a self-made
man. And he said to me, "When you watch TV," when you watch the Discovery Channel, for
example, "you're always seeing the best person in the world doing whatever it is that they
do." So you're watching American Idol, you're seeing the best singers in the world. If you
watch someone catching an anaconda on Discovery Channel, they're like the great anaconda catching
expert. [laughter] Now that may or may not be literally true,
but it certainly is true that compared to the social world in which they are, they don't
know anybody who's the best at anything, right? They don't know anybody who's in the top 50th
percentile in the world of being good at whatever it is that they do. And suddenly on TV it
is true. People who are kind of losers and don't really do that well in life aren't actually
on TV. And so it's very inspiring to people from those kinds of backgrounds to be pulled
up. So that's one thing I would say. And then I think it's a lot of other things.
The job opportunities in the big city, people hear about this. It's interesting when you
go to small towns one of the things that really struck me is you can sit with a kid in a small
town in India today, 25 year-old kid, and you can ask them, "Who is everybody who's
left this town?" And they know everybody who's left the town. They know where they're working,
they know what they're doing, they know whether they have a girlfriend or not, they know whether
they have a bike or a car, they know exactly, they keep very close tabs on every migrant
who's left. And the migrant stories come back kind of
resounding and echoing and they loom large in people's minds. And I think that has a
lot to do with it. They now say 31 people are leaving an Indian
village every minute and arriving in the city. Thirty-one people a minute. It's 10 million
people a year. So you've heard of partition in 1947, India's doing a partition worth of
human migration a year right now, and that's in a way if you were looking for the data
of people waking up and saying, "I don't wanna be farmer's son," that's the data; it's 31
people a minute. Because all of those people are from agricultural backgrounds of some
kind and they're deserting it. [pause] >>male #2: Did you talk to people who went
back from U.S. or other parts of the world and how did they feel about it immediately
and in longer term? >>Anand Giridharadas: Yeah, I mean in a way
many of them were my friends; people like me who grew up in this country or grew up
in India came to America and then moved back. But I knew and spent a lot of time with east
bound migrants. Obviously there was a range of experiences
that people had. But I think everybody, if you think about what people tended to have
in common, everybody went with I think fairly low expectations about their capacity to make
a difference in India, to be accepted in India, to feel that they could have impact in the
world. And I think all of them in different ways were very surprised and pleasantly surprised. All of us who formed that kind of wave of
people who made that move were surprised by the extent to which this country that had
seemed kind of immovable before to us, was more moveable and more dynamic than America,
for example, a lot more moveable and dynamic than America. America now feels to me to be a very kind
of aging, stagnant country and I never could have imagined that it would be India that
would make America feel like that to me. But America does feel like that in contrast. It
doesn't feel like everything and anything is possible in America anymore, as many Americans
will tell you. It does feel like that in India even though so many people continue to live
such hard lives. The narrative has changed. And I think a lot of us who made that migration
that's the kind, the overwhelming sentiment of the experience. [pause] >>female #2: Related to that previous question,
do your parents or your parents' generations recognize this change that you've experienced
and seen as well? >>Anand Giridharadas: It's interesting they
-- [pause] clearly, I mean they read the paper, they
certainly read my articles in the paper. And not just my parents but that whole generation
is obviously aware at a kind of very macro level of what's happening in the world and
the fact that India is now getting this new recognition and that it's changed. But I think that a lot of any human being
builds narratives in their life about their life. And those narratives in a way acquire
a life of their own even when the data underneath them changes, right? So just as in a way Google
has this narrative of being this kind of startup company where everybody wears jeans and is
very casual, even though you're now big brother in this big extraordinary, huge Fortune 500
company. [laughter] And those narratives outlast the reality. And I think for immigrants the reality, the
narrative always has to be, "We left and there's a reason we left." And it would cause too
much psychological friction for an immigrant to kind of expose themselves to the question,
"Should I have left? Maybe actually India was better." It's too much, you don't wanna
walk around your whole life kind of relitigating the question of whether your entire life trajectory
was the right trajectory or not. So I think a lot of people close that question,
and closing that question just as I don't walk around wondering whether I should still
be a writer. I've made that choice and the boat has sailed and now I organize my life
around the narrative of being a writer. And so I think for a lot of migrants you kind
of go and you freeze the question and so I think there is an openness and there's a delight
that India's doing well, but it's easier for my generation to embrace the data of what
has changed I think then for people who themselves made that very difficult choice to leave. [pause] >>male #2: How important is someone's caste
to new opportunities and stuff? Does that, does no one care about that or some people
care? >>Anand Giridharadas: It?s a bit like the
arranged marriage answer I gave you which is that it really depends on where you are.
I could take you on a tour of places in India, hundreds of places, where caste matters almost
as it did in 1500. I could take you to villages where everybody knows who's who, where people
wear different markings that signals that very clearly, where residential living is
still bounded in those villages by caste. So we could do a whole tour of places like
that. And if you only did that you'd think, "Gosh, nothing has changed in this place in
500 years." I could also take you on a tour, a long tour
in India, of places where caste if absolutely irrelevant, it never comes up. People certainly
don't talk about it and even generally speaking it's not a big part of life. If you went to
the Google Hyderabad Office, no one is sitting around talking about their caste, I can assure
you. But even there I would be curious about what
percentage of people at Google Hyderabad are former untouchables, right? It's probably,
if other companies are a guide, much lower than the proportion of the population. I would
image that the proportion of the people that are Brahmins, even though Brahmins are a few
percentage points of India, is fairly high in a place like Google Hyderabad. So in a way it's a lot like race in America
that there are places, rural Mississippi where it's kind of like it was and not very far
removed. There are places like New York and San Francisco where it's moved on a lot and
certainly the old kind of lines have dissolved. But there's probably nowhere that is entirely
untouched by the fact that the society did this to itself for a long time, which is arbitrarily
segregate people, make those traits inheritable and kind of stack people in this very nonsensical
hierarchy. And in a way that's a kind of trauma, the way South Africa has a trauma of Apartheid,
the way America has a trauma of race, India will continue to have that trauma of caste. And the way it most seems to assert itself
today is this kind of residual sense that all men are not quite created equal. That
there's something natural about inequality and there's this kind of sneaking suspicion
in India that lingers that inequality's maybe a little bit natural, a little bit meant to
be. And I think it'll take a very long time for
that stain to be washed away, if that makes sense. [pause] >>Nick: Are there any other questions? Okay, I have one final question. So to bear
witness to that type of change and actually be there and when you were comparing it to
your feeling now relative to the United States and the classic American dream, is it something
you want to get back to fast? Do you envision that you would be almost a reverse migrant
and go back and actually be there to be part of that? >>Anand Giridharadas: I think in a way I've
thought about that a lot. I think in a way two things have changed, not one. The first
thing that's changed is Indian's become a relatively more attractive place and America
has perhaps become a relatively less attractive place. But that's not the only shift. The second big shift is in the very nature
of how people immigrate and how they migrate. And I think the idea in a way of what my parents
did the big one time, one way immigration is fading. And what for our generation I think is more
relevant and kind of appealing as a way of life, is a kind of series, a circulation. So I think the choice that I've made for India
is India is now on my very short list of places that is a core part of my life. But I don't
feel the need to make the same choice my parents did of this or this and now invest 30 years
and that's everything. I think it'll continue to be a part of every year. I think I'll probably
go live there again for extended periods. It's a part of my consciousness, but there
are other things for me that I wanna know and do and experience and write about. And
so right now I'm very much thinking of those places as well. >>Nick: Great. Well Anand is gonna stay to
sign books afterwards so please stick around and join me in thanking him for visiting Google. [applause] >>Anand Giridharadas: Thank you all. [applause]
