Diolch i 'nhrwyn Book

I found this book at my local library on the for-sale shelf, for a buck. I purchased it because we, my wife and I, had recently been partnered with an Indian girl attending Middlebury College and I thought that perhaps it would increase my general understanding of Indian culture, and be able to ask her intelligent-sounding questions. Well, for whatever reason, that relationship has been worthless, I don't know why, and it is beside the point to this review. I started reading the book a week or so before taking off for a month of travel in India with my wife, younger son, who lived and worked in India for two years and his future wife and her younger sister. We had planned to visit Kolkata and I had written a paper on the city in a course in graduate school: Housing in Emerging markets. Even though it was published 40 years ago a lot of it is still relevant and provides a deeper perspective about the country, its people and its amazing and complex diversity, if you are able to read between the lines and ask the right questions of the right people.
I found the book, a memoir, written by a husband-wife team of professional writers to be intimately satisfying. The wife, an Indian, born in Kolkata is married to a Canadian born in America, return to live in India, Kolkata, to be exact, with their two children after some personal family disasters. The wife has been living a modern western life-style and has basically been away for 14 years, returning sporadically to visit family, every year or two for a summer vacation. She writes about what her life could have been, had she stayed and pursued a more traditional life as a Bengali woman from an upper middle-class family. Many of her friends, from her private Catholic School, not associated with Mother teresa, have stayed, and embraced that lifestyle and its expectations, rather than flee for education, a job and ultimately marriage and family as she did. His writing examines India, and Indians, his wife's smothering extended family in particular, in all its complexities and contradiction sand with good-natured humor coupled with disdain, incredulity and exasperation all at the same time. I do think Indians are their own worst enemy. We had a wonderful trip, visiting Amritsar on the Pakistani border to the west to Kolkata, on the border with Bangladesh to the east. It is an enormous country, home to more than a billion people, and it manages to work, certainly not to Western standards and expectations, but it seems to work for them. This book does as good a job as anything, but naturally the ultimate is to immerse yourself in the county: see it, smell it, feel it, taste it, hear it. Words are truly inadequate and a weak attempt at trying to explain this place, which in all honesty is beyond explanation.