Interesting content, but the narrative structure was distracting to me, as characters and facts skipped around and repeated in odd ways.

I think I need a better understanding of the politics of India to fully appreciate this book. For me, it was most interesting when describing the lives of the various young people.

It's almost hard to believe now, but only several years ago India and China were deemed equally likely to be the economic "it" country that would be crucial to driving future global growth. India saw nearly double-digit growth in the mid-2000's and was even projected to see faster economic growth than China beginning in 2020. Today, India has largely taken a backseat to China, with the latter being seen as the global economic force and getting its own standalone section in The Economist. India is still likely to be a major player in the future, as the country has over 300 million citizens under 15 years old is set to pass the graying China as the world's most populous country around 2022. In The End of Karma, journalist Somini Sengupta chronicles how India's massive youth population is transforming the country and shaping its future through a handful of representative stories. The book is equally parts engrossing and illuminating and will leave the reader with a firm understanding of India and its future.

Sengupta's central thesis is that the gradual dismantling of India's state run economy in 1991 helped India's youth break free from the country's past and determine a new future for themselves. Caste and social standing no longer circumscribe Indians to a small geographic and occupational niche, as people can rise from a poverty-stricken caste to engineer in Bangalore or Silicon Valley. Sengupta illustrates her points through seven profiles of Indians from a variety of different social standings and Indian states. There is Anumpam and Verish using education to escape from their lower-caste upbringings, Varsha, a young woman from a caste of cleaners who is aspiring to be a cop in a country that can be dangerous for women, and Rahki who associates with Maoist rebels despite growing up in a decently prosperous household.The common thread between all of these stories are that the subjects are shaping their own destinies, a decently novel concept in a culture that has largely been bound by tradition in the past.

The End of Karma reads like 7 New York Times Magazine articles. While each story stands alone fine on its own, Sengupta will occasionally note similarities between her profiles and how they showcase similar themes. Sengupta covers the United Nations for paper and previously served as its New Dehli bureau chief. She writes with an eye for vivid details and helps bring settings ranging from the slums of Bihar to the gleaming luxury skyscrapers of Gurgaon alive to the reader. She also frequently points out how these individual stories showcase broader macro trends across the entire country and while the personal stories stand very well by themselves (I frequently found myself emotionally invested in the characters and rooted heavily them to succeed), the broader insights help leave the reader with a strong understanding of the major trends currently impacting the country, such as the sorry state of education, rise of Narendra Modi, and spate of urban violence against young women.

Overall, The End of Karma is a compelling read to anyone curious about India. It is well-written and insightful and serves as an excellent primer to the issues that will shape India's future. Sengupta seems to be aiming for a foreigner audience and some of her material may already be familiar to native Indians or those who have closely been following the country for the past decade or so, but if you fall outside of that camp there should be a lot to learn and enjoy from The End of Karma.

8 / 10

An accessible and informative history lesson on modern India.

I had the great fortune of hearing Sengupta talk as part of a promotional tour for this book. The statistics she quoted in her talk blew my mind. 1 million Indians turn 18 every month. The government has to find jobs for all the new adults and make sure they are adequately trained for these jobs. I remember walking away from the talk stressed and anxious wondering what India is going to do and how this generation (to which I belong) is going to end up. The book manages to convey exactly the same sense of urgency that I felt that day. The spin on aspiration and destiny and the focus on the youth of India is inspired. It's a great way to tell the story of India's legacy and India's future.

I was a little skeptical of the format- stories that are interwoven with hard facts and figures- of this book. Every time someone has attempted to convey a sense of India through a story or even a handful of stories, the result has backfired in my opinion. As Sengupta herself says, 7 stories can never be representative of any country, least of all India. But as "marginal" as these stories are (her words, not mine), they are extremely illuminating. Let's be honest, I grew up amongst these stories. But as Sengupta so beautifully puts it, in India you learn to see distress and yet not see distress. These stories are beautiful portraits of the lives of people who usually only appear in my world as statistics or news articles peripheral characters at most and do a great deal to get the reader personally invested.

This is an excellent book to read if you want to know more about India whether you are Indian or not and whether you live in the country or not. If you're not Indian, this is one of the most nuanced descriptions of life in India. If you're Indian, chances are, you (like me) haven't looked too deeply into the lives of these people who aren't in your social strata or in your state/region of the country. And chances are you will gain some perspective into the world's most unlikely democracy.

A book that follows the hope, expectations, and frustrations of those born in post-liberalization India; described as noonday's children(as opposed to midnight's children - those born around India's independence) by the writer. The writer returns after decades to India , the country of her birth, as chief editor of Nytimes India. It is both a journey of her discovery of the "new India" and stories that tell of the contradictions that it has become. A country torn between its traditions and its aspirations, between its ambitions and inequities, between its boundless expectations and the restricting realities. Well written - worth a read for a peek into new India. Author does try to remain neutral and not be too critical of India's failings, but perhaps only does as well as an outsider could.

Aspirations are not just a reflection of devotion but also of aggression. The hunger 'to achieve something' is common in the youth of India who has such a clear vision of their success that it feels almost a reality to them instead of a distant dream. This spirit of India's young to chase their audacious bold dreams, bend the rules (either created by self or by the society), relentlessly push the boundaries is what Somini Sengupta has wonderfully captured in this book.

With literary beauty, the warmth of empathy, and acute awareness of India’s contextual realities, she writes about the lives of seven different individuals to shed light on the macro-level strengths and challenges facing contemporary India. She brilliantly outlines the socio-political landscape of the country with the help of individual experiences of a few people some of whom she shadowed over years. The writing style is very journalistic - much aligning to the author's career as a foreign correspondent for decades.

Read the book if you want a sneak peek into the social realities of India's young whose lives are constrained by resources and rules but not their imagination and courage to dream. This is not just for the international folks who might not be aware of Indian context but also for the urban educated class who might not have much experience of listening to the many who don't belong to their ideological bubble. The book might challenge your assumption about how complex it can get to define modern India which still is steeped into gender, caste, and religious inequality among other things.

Out of all the stories, I think, the last three stories which are focused on the lives of women are my favorite one. The stories do a great job of tying together various complex pieces: lawlessness around freedom of speech, the abuse of power of the 'protectors of the Indian culture', and the constant battle between individual freedom and community harmony.

Taking recourse to seven diverse real life stories or rather strenuous struggles, Somini Sengupta reveals the arc of paradigm shift that is catapulted Indian into the forefront of global capitalism and economic development. An India that surges ahead with optimism, outlook, drive - a far cry from the sordid environment the author herself experienced in her younger days before she emigrated to the United States of America leaving behind a confused, desolate and desperate nation reeling from the after effects of an autocratic emergency imposed upon by a power hungry Prime Minister.

Somini Sengupta returns to India in the role of a correspondent for the New York Times and the panorama spread out before her eyes is one of a coruscation of ambition, iridescence of previously entrenched beliefs and an inescapable fervour that seems omniscient and omnipresent. Anupam, the son of a auto-rickshaw driver has his sights set on getting himself into the hallowed portals of one of the famed Indian Institute of Technology ("IIT") centres, an achievement that would redeem his family from the clutches of poverty, deprivation and squalor. Rakhi is a reluctant fundamentalist who joins the dreaded Maoist Rebellion in the jungles of Chattisgarh after her helpless family sinks into a quicksand of penury. Exasperated by the pressure of killing, the strains of camouflage and enervated by a constant fear of being either killed or captured by the armed forces, Rakhi takes the extraordinarily dangerous step of betraying her comrades and surrendering to the police. Under the aegis of a lackadaisical witness protection programme, Rakhi speaks to the author about the circumstances that led to her life taking a strange and unenviable twist, for the worse.

Somini Sengupta, in her book intertwines narratives, by dwelling into her own past and juxtaposing the chosen path of her protagonists thereby lending a stark albeit clear contrast. A contrast that both differentiates as well as integrates the India of the present from the India of the past. The stories are spontaneous and inspiring in addition to being the mirror that reflects the progression of India towards economic prosperity and also a regression unto social imbalance triggered by a still persistent medieval belief system that has at its edifice an ineradicable attitude towards caste, colour, creed, community and gender. It is this contrast, which as Somini Sengupta, illustrates in her work, cleaves India. While the son of an autorickshaw driver proves the power of meritocracy by securing a place for himself in an educational institution hitherto thought of as merely for the elitists, a pair of educated, well-to-do, real estate owning brothers murder their own kith and kin under the nauseating justification and ruse of 'honour killing'. It is also a cleave which on the one hand recognises that there is no future for a country that does not envisage an empowerment of the woman and the preservation of her dignity; while on the other hand leaves a woman lying without a stitch on, with her entrails streaming out of her on a busy stretch of a bustling road, not before the hapless victim was gang raped by a bunch of drunken perverts - in a moving bus.

"The End of Karma" is neither a fairy tale nor a gloomy portent. It is a binding narrative that tries to pry into the machinations of an economic superpower with the highest concentration of youth in its population, which in trying to punch beyond its weight has both succeeded and failed beyond all reasonable expectations.

"For centuries, an Indian's destiny has been scripted in the womb. There, it was determined whether you could go to school or look a policeman in the eye, what work you did, who you married and if you could wear diamond studs in your ears.
Noonday's generation is not like the generations that have come before it. These young Indians expect democracy to deliver something- for them. The idea of democracy is no longer just topsoil, to invoke Bhimra Ambedkar, India's first law minister. It has become very much part of the undersoil. Millions of Indians coming of age in the last two decade take it for granted that they ought to be able to make their own fate. They are hardly going to bottle their aspirations forever. They may not give their elders much time. They can be pushy."