The Upside Down Tree

When he called India a ?functioning anarchy, ? economist Kenneth Galbraith may have been thinking about Uttar Pradesh (UP), in northern India. Some Indians laughingly refer to Uttar Pradesh as a ?loser state.? Known as a home of deep poverty, incurable corruption and sticky social problems, UP is not the India that now appears regularly in The New York Times and Newsweek. This is the other India; the one that modernity has largely left behind, and this book is the result of Rick Connerney''s repeated residencies over the last 18 years in that state. Most of India''s 1.13 billion people live far from the call centers of Bangalore and Delhi and Westernized cities like Mumbai. A huge slice of humanity, 17.5% of the world''s population, is practically invisible and impenetrable to most Americans. Exploring the realities of agriculture, business, the environment, politics, the economy, marriage, language and the arts, the author introduces the real people of India. At the heart of each chapter lies an epiphany about Indian culture ? Copernican intellectual shifts, radical reverses in the way the author made sense of the environment, when the evidence seemed to support one conclusion but further experience pointed to a different answer.a"