Siddhartha Deb

Harvard Book Store is very pleased to welcome novelist and journalist SIDDHARTHA DEB as he discusses his new work of narrative journalism and cultural analysis, The Beautiful and the Damned: A Portrait of the New India.

Siddhartha Deb grew up in a remote town in the northeastern hills of India and made his way to the United States via a fellowship at Columbia. Six years after leaving home, he returned as an undercover reporter for The Guardian, working at a call center in Delhi in 2004, a time when globalization was fast proceeding and Thomas L. Friedman declared the world flat. Deb’s experience interviewing the call-center staff led him to travel throughout the subcontinent and record his observations.

The Beautiful and the Damned examines India’s many contradictions through various individual and extraordinary perspectives. Deb introduces the reader to an unforgettable group of Indians, including a Gatsby-like mogul in Delhi whose hobby is producing big-budget gangster films that no one sees; a wiry, dusty farmer named Gopeti whose village is plagued by suicides and was the epicenter of a riot; and a sad-eyed waitress named Esther who has set aside her dual degrees in biochemistry and botany to serve Coca-Cola to arms dealers at an upscale hotel called Shangri La.

"As subtle and sensitive as it is shocking and significant, you will not read a better book on the 'human' face of globalization this year." —The Globe and Mail (Canada)