Interest in India has never been greater. Here Shashi Tharoor, one of the subcontinent's most respected writers and diplomats, offers precious insights into this complex, multifaceted land, which despite its dazzling diversity of languages, customs, and cultures remains—more than 60 years after its founding—the world’s largest democracy. He describes the vast changes that have transformed this once sleeping giant into a world leader in science and technology, a nation once poverty-stricken that now boasts a middle class of over 300 million people—as large as the entire population of the United States! Artfully combining hard facts and statistics with opinion and observation, Tharoor discusses the strengths and weaknesses of his rapidly evolving homeland in five areas—politics, economics, culture, society, and sports—and takes a fresh look at the world’s second most populous country.

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India and China are getting all the attention when it comes to books and authors. There is an explosion books everywhere dealing with the future that is India and a peek of its history, its people, culture and the dynamics of this eclectic country of contradictions.

Shashi Tharoor , author of The Elephant, the Tiger, and the Cell Phone: Reflections on India, The Emerging 21st-Century Power , former UN Ambassador and all time writer attempts to capture this phenomena in this collection of essays. The book is divided into 6 parts with various subjects that are not necessarily connected but yet give us a glimpse of ‘Why India Matters’ as he writes in its preface.

Calling India a young and optimistic country, where ‘millions live in wretched poverty even as India boasts of the largest number of billionaires, he hopes that future India must rise above the past if we are to conquer the future’

Topics range from the idea of India, Hinduism and Hindutva, the threat to India’s secularism and his interpretations of the Epics that was the basis of his other book ‘The Great Indian Novel. The challenges are plenty from poverty to illiteracy, religion, societal ills, apathy and lack of civic sense in daily lives. If these issues are not dealt, he suggests that it will lead to a movement among the have-nots that can tear the country apart.

Other  chapters touch upon all things popular, Bollywood, Cricket, the decline of the Sari, the Indians who made India , its women with a glossary in the end of 'A to Z of being Indian'.He draws anecdotes from his vast travels and conversations with personalities and his exchanges with ordinary Indians over the years. This is a book that is mostly essays or opinion pieces and musings of the author.

Mr. Tharoor himself notes that the "book is not a survey of modern Indian history or politics," and refers readers in search of this to his India: From Midnight to the Millennium and Beyond

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