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.