Quoting Shashi Tharoor from one of his columns in Sunday Times from about a year ago. "Underdevelopment used to be the condition erroneously ascribed to India by economic theoreticians, who looked at some of our labour-intensive agricultural techniques and promptly concluded that we were primitive. In fact, everything in India is overdeveloped, particularly the social structure, the bureaucracy, the political process, the monetary system, the university network, the industrial base and (as Galbraith tactlessly observed) the women. Given its economic and imperial history in a number of previous Golden Ages under Ashoka, Vikramaditya and Akbar, India is not underdeveloped at all; it is, as I argued in The Great Indian Novel, a highly developed country in an advanced state of decay." Read the novel with this one idea and satisfaction is guaranteed.
Tharoor takes the mythological Indian epic whose early texts date as early as 8th Century B.C. while later ones date as late as 4th Century A.D. and juxtaposes the multi-generation story upon the recent history of India's independence dating early 20th Century A.D. The result is a phenomenal convergence of wit, liberalism, history and satire. Tharoor's grasp of characters from both stories is quite deep, and it shows in every page where his pearls of wisdom and genius are leniently scattered. I would not ruin the surprise by mapping the key characters for you, but discovering that is compelling enough to pick up the book. Like every good book, this has several layers of depth and the better your understanding of the Mahabharata and modern Indian history, more the gratification. If you can forgive the occasional incoherency and chronological flaws that come with the premise of the book, you will find a convincing illustration of India's "advance state of decay".
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