Dimensions
153 x 234 x 19mm
'Here, then, was the reality of India. In spite of all the talk about technology, this educated, clean-cut young man was looking for work the way a man might have fifty years ago, walking the many miles from one random factory to another, hoping that his civilized demeanour would get him an interview with an official, but in all likelihood never hearing back from any of these companies. He asked me for directions to the steel factory and left, walking under the highway towards the smokestacks of the factory'.
From business leadership seminars in echoing, carpeted meeting rooms to ghost-like figures walking from town to town looking for work in small factories; from the naïve waitresses labouring in the mecca of five-star hotels to farmers struggling to grow the right crops for the 21st century, The Beautiful and the Damned is the riveting, moving, darkly comic, brilliantly told story of modern India.
With the novelist's vision, Siddhartha Deb's extraordinary book paints a portrait of this country in turmoil through the story of its people: aspiring and deluded, desperate and hopeful, beautiful and damned.
