Screw The Beautiful Forevers: Life, Death, and Hope in a Pleasant, Middle-Class Gated Community in Delhi

by Claire Berlinski

Is the Indian century ahead of us? Nick Booker-Soni thinks so. I met Nick at a dinner party in Paris. The other guests were tech experts, scientists, and investors, and all were gloomy about the West. Progress wasn't progressing, they complained. The economy was permanently stalled. There were too many impediments to innovation. The Scientific and Industrial Revolutions had reached the end of the line. The West was doomed. But Nick, on the other hand, who lives in Delhi, was by far the most optimistic Westerner I’d met since 2008. It's too bad the others weren't listening to our small talk that evening, because if Nick's right, India has the answer to their questions and the solution to all our problems. He and I spoke for a while at that open window overlooking the Seine. “Obviously,” he said, "India’s the key. But don’t take my word for it. Come see for yourself.” I did. This short book describes what I found.

62 pages, Kindle Edition

Published April 15, 2016

About the author

CLAIRE BERLINSKI WAS born in 1968 in California, and grew up in New York, Seattle and California. She received her undergraduate degree in Modern History and her doctorate in International Relations from Balliol College at Oxford University. She has since lived and worked in Britain, Thailand, Laos, France, and Turkey as a journalist, academic, consultant and freelance writer.

Reviews

[Vince Snow · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wow this short book was great! The central premise of this book is that things are looking good for India in the next century. China's population recently began shrinking, and with it hopes of the continued Chinese economic miracle. India on the other hand, is experiencing no such slow down of population or economic growth. on April 24, 2023, the UN announced that India had surpassed China as the world's most populous country. Berlinski (who writes a great newsletter on Substack called The Cosmopolitan Globalist, which is where I heard about this book) has no rose-colored glasses on about the suffering and poverty that currently exists in the nation. It has real problems. But a combination of factors is turning many of those around most of which are related to the increasing number of Indian citizens who are getting degrees in the hard sciences. Berlinski talks about a culture of optimism in the country and of a population who are willing to outwork us here in the West. Would highly recommend.

Words
meretricious: apparently attractive but having in reality no value or integrity
Shinola: a brand of Boot Polish, used as a euphemism for “shit”
Veda: the most ancient Hindu scriptures, written in early Sanskrit and containing hymns, philosophy, and guidance on ritual for the priests of Vedic religion. Believed to have been directly revealed to seers among the early Aryans in India, and preserved by oral tradition, the four chief collections are the Rig Veda, Sama Veda, Yajur Veda, and Atharva Veda.
Rig Veda: the oldest and principal of the Vedas, a collection of 1028 hymns composed in the 2nd millennium bc in early Sanskrit
Pith: pierce or sever the spinal cord of (an animal) so as to kill or immobilize it.
Tagore: (1861–1941), Indian writer and philosopher. His poetry pioneered the use of colloquial Bengali. Nobel Prize for Literature (1913).
kundalini: (in yoga) latent female energy believed to lie coiled at the base of the spine.
Swami: a Hindu male religious teacher
En passant: by the way; incidentally. French, literally ‘in passing’.
Brahmin: a member of the highest Hindu caste, that of the priesthood
La metaphore juste: French, ‘the right metaphor’
Syncretic: the amalgamation or attempted amalgamation of different religions, cultures, or schools of thought
Fakir: a Muslim (or, loosely, a Hindu) religious ascetic who lives solely on alms.
Vientiane: the capital and chief port of Laos, on the Mekong River; population 231,700 (est. 2009).
Catharism: a heretical medieval Christian sect which professed a form of Manichaean dualism and sought to achieve great spiritual purity.
Suttee: a former practice in India whereby a widow threw herself on to her husband's funeral pyre.
Rapiscan: Rapiscan Systems is an American privately held company that specialises in walk-through metal detectors and X-ray machines for screening airport luggage and cargo
Legerdemain: skillful use of one's hands when performing conjuring tricks.
Jugaad: a flexible approach to problem-solving that uses limited resources in an innovative way:
Three-score and ten: an idiom that refers to the average lifespan of a person, which is 70 years.
Purdah: the practice among women in certain Muslim and Hindu societies of living in a separate room or behind a curtain, or of dressing in all-enveloping clothes, in order to stay out of the sight of men or strangers
Le mot juste: French, ‘the right word’
Yutzes: A Yiddish word meaning a derogatory term for someone who is foolish, stupid, or unthinking

[Bill Pye · Rating 5 out of 5]

Learned alot

Very informative makes me want to read more on India . want to know more very curious if all info is correct