Reimagining India: Unlocking the Potential of Asia’s Next Superpower Read Free Page A

transformations—and confides that one of his most unexpected challenges was deciding whether to put meat on the menu in company cafeterias.
    Menus are also on the mind of restaurateur Rohini Dey, who offers a ringing manifesto for transforming foreign perceptions of Indian food, banishing “$8.99 all-you-can-eat buffets” with “mushy, overcooked fare swimming in oil and nuclear food dyes” so that Indian food may take its rightful place as a genuinely global cuisine. Ogilvy CEO Christopher J. Graves, meanwhile, shares his thoughts about “Brand India,” arguing that the “Incredible !ndia” campaign could use a dose of credibility.
    Defining India’s identity: Anand Giridharadas explores a different dimension of the Indian identity. The focus of his interest is not national but individual—how Indians are reimagining themselves. For individuals, he argues, the Indian dream is “the dream of self-invention: of having the freedom and the means of authoring yourself into being. Your caste, your class, your native place, your religion, your parents’ occupation, your family dietary habits—all these things be damned. It is the dream of becoming yourself, free of history and judgment and guilt.”
    In a way, India as a nation is engaged in something like that. Some of the deepest questions in Indian religion and philosophy swirl around the idea of karma. In its most simplistic form, the notion of karma suggests one’s destiny is fated, predetermined by some prior act in another existence. But karma also provides for free will and the possibility that through one’s own choices and actions, one can influence the trajectory of fate. What we find so heartening about all the essays in this volume isthat they remind us that modern India is in control of its own destiny. India’s people hold the power to unlock their nation’s full potential.
    Achieving that vision, however, will require all Indians to work together. Bill Gates, in his essay, recounts how India’s people did exactly that in fighting polio. About that effort, he writes: “India has shown the world that when its people set an ambitious goal, mobilize the country, and measure the impact, India’s promise is endless. . . . India has miles to go in this quest, by any measure, but it has shown it has the will and means to realize its full potential.”
    We couldn’t agree more.
    —August 2013
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    1 . J. W. McCrindle, Ancient India as Described by Megasthenes and Arrian (Trubner & Co., 1877), p. 32.
    2 . Angus Madison, The World Economy, vols. 1-2 (OECD Publishing, 2006), p. 638.
    3 . Alex von Tunzelmann, Indian Summer: The Secret History of the End of an Empire (Henry Holt, 2007), p. 13.

the rediscovery of india
    Fareed Zakaria
    Fareed Zakaria is host of CNN’s Fareed Zakaria GPS, an editor-at-large for Time magazine, and author of The Post-American World.
    Is India even a country? It’s not an outlandish question. “India is merely a geographical expression,” Winston Churchill said in exasperation. “It is no more a single country than the Equator.” The founder of Singapore, Lee Kuan Yew, recently echoed that sentiment, arguing that “India is not a real country. Instead it is thirty-two separate nations that happen to be arrayed along the British rail line.”
    India gives diversity new meaning. The country contains at least fifteen major languages, hundreds of dialects, several major religions, and thousands of tribes, castes, and subcastes. A Tamil-speaking Brahmin from the south shares little with a Sikh from Punjab; each has his own language, religion, ethnicity, tradition, and mode of life. Look at a picture of independent India’s first cabinet and you will see a collection of people, each dressed in regional or religious garb, each with a distinct title that applies only to members of his or her community (Pandit, Sardar, Maulana, Babu, Rajkumari).
    Or look at Indian politics today. After every parliamentary election over