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Planet India
India is the new America, affirms Mira Kamdar an Indian-American scholar in her latest book: Planet India: How the Fastest-Growing Democracy is Transforming America and the World. As its corollary she says:as goes India, so goes the world. Truly, it’s a book that is very bullish on India
Mira Kamdar grew up living between the United States, Europe and India. Kamdar, a senior fellow at the World Policy Institute at the New School in New York and an associate fellow at the Asia Society, declares: "We already live on Planet India…This book is about what kind of planet that can be."The new and powerful India is technologically savvy, culturally hip, politically powerful and poised to challenge the dominance of the western world".
In Planet India, Kamdar tells the dramatic story of a nation in the midst of redefining itself and the world. Provocative, timely, and essential, Planet India is the groundbreaking book that will convince Americans just how high the stakes are-what there is to lose, and what there is to gain from India’s meteoric rise.
According to Kamdar,India has within its grasp all the elements it needs to imagine a different trajectory. Because it is still a developing country, it can choose to develop differently. India does not have to blindly follow the American agribusiness model and become another fast-food nation. It does not have to allow a military-industrial complex to dictate national priorities. It can - it must - forge its own path, lest a world hell-bent on consumption for its own sake and the dangerous vanities of military one-upmanship lead us all into oblivion
More importantly, Kamdar suggests that the notion in the West that developing economically means becoming, in all ways, like the existing developed Western countries - is a deeply prejudiced and flawed one. She believes that it comes as much from an inability to imagine an alternative model as from the hubris of assuming that "our" system is the best for everyone.
This is why India is so important. It is a non-Western, Asian country, an ancient civilization that is undergoing rapid growth and profound change. If India can do this, as a democracy and as an open society, yet do it as India, taking what makes sense from the West but doing so in order to invent a new paradigm that works for India, it will show that democracy and economic development can go hand in hand, that democracy and freedom of expression and of religion are not luxuries for developed, Western countries, and that there is a non-Western alternative to the Chinese model.
Kamdar has also authored another work: Motiba’s Tattoos.
source: INDOlink:Francis C. Assisi |
| | Posted 5/8/2007 2:14 AM - 65 Views - 0 eProps - 0 comments
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