Akash Kapur - India Becoming

Akash Kapur in conversation with Philip Gourevitch, The New Yorker

The son of an Indian father and an American mother, Akash Kapur spent his formative years in India and his early adulthood in the United States. In 2003, he returned to his country of birth, eager to be part of its exciting growth and modernization in the newly emerging global order. What he found was a nation even more transformed than he had imagined and where the changes were fundamentally altering Indian society, for better and sometimes for worse.

To further understand these changes, he sought out the Indians experiencing them firsthand, not only among the social upwardly mobile urbanites but rural dwellers whose traditional worlds are changing before their eyes and who variously embrace and mold those changes to their own needs while they themselves are being irrevocably changed.

Followed by a book sale and signing.

Co-sponsored by SAJA (the South Asian Journalists Association)

Akash Kapur has been published in The Atlantic, The Economist, Granta, The New York Times Book Review and The New Yorker, among others. He used to write a fortnightly “Letter from India” column for the International Herald Tribune. The column also ran occasionally in the Week in Review section of The New York Times. India Becoming: A Portrait of Life in Modern India is his first book.

Philip Gourevitch, a long-time staff writer at The New Yorker, is the author of Standard Operating Procedure: The Ballad of Abu Ghraib (2008), A Cold Case (2001), and We Wish To Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With Our Families: Stories from Rwanda (1998), winner of many prizes, including the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Guardian First Book Award. His books, short fiction, essays and reportage have been translated into a dozen languages. He is the former editor of The Paris Review.

Click here to read an excerpt from India Becoming

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