Reviews and Buzz
Reviews of Imagining India: Ideas for the New Century
Satyameva Jayate [Blog]: Imagining India - A Review
Shantanu Bhagwat, 5 January 2009
“I would strongly recommend the book to anyone with more than a passing interest in public policy and governance. It is a great overview of some of our most immediate challenges and a good compendium of ideas that will dominate public discussion in the years to come.
I sincerely hope that our legislators, politicians, policy-makers and opinion leaders take note of some of the policies and ideas it contains…It might help us get a step closer to a better India.
On the back cover, Thomas Friedman has called Nilekani a “great explainer”. Reading “Imagining India” may help you understand why he said that.”
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The Statesman: The Nation As An Idea Of The Future
Anjana Basu, 28 December 2008
“Nilekani sets his ideas down lucidly with telling arguments in their favour. What is more important is that he writes from his own personal viewpoint as one of India’s most successful entrepreneurs. As a man who had the vision as part of Infosys to change lives for many, he undoubtedly has many insights which are useful to those who want to build a stronger India.”
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The Hindu Business Line: Real and Imagined
Rasheeda Bhagat, 12 December 2008
“Even those daunted by the 500-odd pages of the book, would do well to read at least three chapters — ‘India, by its People’, ‘From Rejection to Open Arms’ (entrepreneurs) and ‘From Maneaters to Enablers’ (IT). Another must-read portion of this book — which the author has managed to keep remarkably readable through a simple style, clarity of thought, interesting anecdotes and not shying away from calling a spade a spade — is the one relating to English language providing “upward mobility” to a chunk of our people.”
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Business Standard: Ideating Audaciously
Suhel Seth, 28 Novermber 2008
“It would not be wrong to qualify Nandan Nilekani’s Imagining India as a tome as memorable and, perhaps, as appropriate as Barack Obama’s Audacity of Hope. So, although Nilekani describes himself as “unelectable”, it represents a paradox, which unravels later in the book. It is an eminently readable treatise not just on why India is what it is today, but what it can be tomorrow. The catch is that we must help realise the ideas that are already in the public sphere, but are not yet part of our governance system. Throughout his career, Nilekani has not only helped define India to the larger world beyond our shores, but has been an effective ambassador in building the sheen around ‘Brand India’. It is from this vantage point that he begins to assemble this tome of ideas.”
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Hindustan Times: Imagining India - Ideas for the New Century
Vir Sanghvi, 22 November 2008
“In the book’s 500-odd pages, Nandan deals with these issues in a manner that’s neither condescending or simplistic. There are no profiles and travelogues here. There are previous few anecdotes and only the odd jokes. This is not designed to be some mass-market bestseller, read by purchase managers on plane journeys when they want to trade up from John Grisham. This is a big, serious and important book, one that requires attention and concentration while reading and one where the research (much of it by Devi Yesodharan) shows up on every page. “
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Ecophilo [Blog]: Imagining India
Neelakantan, 7 December 2008
“As he dissects the facets of India, how we reached here, why we are what we are and how we can change, it comes across a simple, sensible, even obvious set of ideas. And the overall attitude is a refreshing one of quiet self belief. How we can use what is given to us to take us where we want to do? How can we do better with the resources that we have? How can we improve our lot? The answers are all out there. Indeed this book makes it a simple to-do manual for any government. In each of them, he ends on a positive note and belief that we can achieve and talks to many who are working on these areas in the right direction.”
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People at Work and Play [Blog]: Nandan Nilekani’s “Imagining India”
B.P. Rao, 8 December 2008
“The book is written in a fairly chatty style and is replete with quotes from experts in many diverse fields. They have, over time, spoken to the author when he checked their reactions to the propositions he had. “Imagining India” has a huge amount of statistical data in the various fields that Nandan writes about- be it education, agriculture, population or the economy as a whole.”
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Livemint: Yes, we can
Anil Padmanabhan, 4 December 2008
“The book is peppered with comments by experts, including Vijay Kelkar, former finance secretary and present chairman of the 13th Finance Commission (and who, according to Nilekani, inspired the book in the first place), C. Rangarajan, former Reserve Bank of India governor, Nicholas Stern, former chief economist of the World Bank, Janagraha’s Ramesh Ramanathan and so on. But one expected Nilekani’s own viewpoints. Especially since the success of Infosys has been achieved despite the handicaps—which the book flags repeatedly—of operating as an entrepreneur in India (although information technology companies have relatively less red tape to deal with than their counterparts in the bricks and mortar economy). This viewpoint remains implicit, articulated only through expert comments. There are moments in the book where you do get glimpses of Nilekani’s brilliance—particularly in the segments where he sets down a blueprint to get around red tape by employing information technology.”
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Outlook India: Path of the Wheel
Sanjaya Baru
“This is an inspirational, optimistic book that makes you more hopeful about India. It rejects our chalta-hai nonchalance and celebrates the Infosysian can-do spirit. But Nilekani regrets that ‘in our politics we are yet to tap into our new language of hope.’
Nilekani is a great learner. Hence, he has been able to write a book that educates. The most stimulating chapters are the ones on urbanisation, education and infrastructure policy. It is a measure of India’s progress this past decade, thanks to the IT revolution and the services economy boom, that few today would challenge his views on the importance of the English language.”
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Business Standard: Changing Orbits
T N Ninan, 6 December 2008
“They [the issues discussed in the book] are all big issues of contemporary relevance, and in all cases the author succeeds in taking you to the heart of the informed debate — which suggests a lot of reading and a lot of intellectual discussion, and the quick absorption that the author is known for. There are 15 pages of reference notes at the end, and a long list of acknowledgements.
But.. sometimes, a chapter or “idea” is little more than a piece of business journalism. In other cases, it works well. The ICT chapter is written by someone who has mastery of the subject; the discussion on English is another success, with a crisp retelling of the tortuous history of attitudes to the language in India and the social and economic forces that have defined the outcome.
The demographic dividend is clearly enunciated in the chapter on people. But on a deepening democracy, Nandan does not seem to have got his hands around the full contours of the debate, nor been able to do effective distilling of the ideas.”