India Now

23:57

December 17, 2008

Employees of Applied Materials, a nanomanufacturing technology solutions company, play volleyball before a backdrop of glass-structured towers which house several information technology companies at the International Tech Park in Bangalore, India, Friday, Aug. 3, 2007. Bangalore, the capital of Indian outsourcing, is perhaps the closest India comes to Wall Street. India's IT firms derive 40 percent of their global revenues from financial services clients, with 61 percent of total sales from the U.S. and 30 percent from Europe. Now that proximity, which has fueled years of growth and transformed the city into one of India's most cosmopolitan, has put Bangalore on edge. (AP) — Employees of a nanomanufacturing technology company play volleyball before a backdrop of office towers which house several information technology companies at the International Tech Park in Bangalore, India, the capital of Indian outsourcing. (AP)

In a single generation, India has gone from economic backwater to sizzling global player. It was famous for temples and bureaucracy. Now it’s famous for economic growth and offshore software.

Shining India. But it’s also the India of Mumbai terror, of ethnic tension, of millions still locked in poverty.

This hour, On Point: An Indian-American goes back to India.

You can join the conversation. Have you gone back to where your family came from? Back to India? Is the opportunity there now? Or still here, in the USA?

Guest:

Anand Giridharadas joins us from Goa, India. His column “Letter from India” appears twice a month in the International Herald Tribune. From 2005 to 2008 he was South Asia correspondent for the paper, based in Mumbai. The American-born child of Indian immigrants, he moved to India in 2003 to work at the management consulting firm McKinsey & Company. He now lives in the village of Verla and is writing a book about social change in modern India.
His recent essay in The New York Times, "India Calling," discussed his return to the country. He wrote about the Mumbai terror attacks one week later.

This program aired on December 17, 2008.