Kick the Ladder

A tour of duty in India is worth at least one book for every journalist from the exalted community of foreign correspondents. The decade of globalisation, and particularly the last four years of the so-called war on terror, have stoked worldwide interest in what goes on in these dark and distant corners of the world where the majority of humanity lurks. The nature of the flourishing marketplace for books about the developing world provides testament to the fact that the cash value of any experience gathered here lies in its vulgarisation.

Daniel Lak has parlayed his many years in India as correspondent for the BBC into a racy narrative. Anybody imagining that he is embarked on the grandiose enterprise of identifying and capturing the inner dynamic of social change in India will be quickly disabused by his secondary title, which pitches the ambitions of the book at a more modest level. Lak's aim is to record his own experiences as a journalist covering the wide and complex canvas that is India. He does this by presenting a sequence of snapshots which help describe the social dynamics that have worked a major transformation in recent years. What Lak seeks to avoid is very clearly stated in his introduction: he does not want the reader to believe that she "will be able to understand fully the process of change in this huge, syncretic, fissiparous and utterly unique democracy."