Excerpt of India Calling by Anand Giridharadas

India was erupting in dreams.

It was the dream to own a microwave or refrigerator or
motorcycle. The dream of a roof of one’s own. The dream to
break caste. The dream to bring a cellphone to every Indian
with someone to call. The dream to buy out businesses in the
kingdom that once colonized you. The dream to marry for
love, all the complicated family considerations be damned.
The dream to become rich. The dream to overthrow the rich in
revolution.

These dreams were by turns farsighted and farfetched,
practical and impractical, generous and selfish, principled
and cynical, focused and vague, passionate and drifting.
They were tempered by countervailing dreams and, as ever in
India, by the dogged pull of the past. Some were changing
India palpably; others had no chance from the beginning. But
that was never the point. It was the very existence of such
brazen, unapologetic dreams, and their diffuse flowering
from one end of India to the other, that so decisively
separated the present from the past – and separated the
India my parents had left from the India to which I had now
returned.

The Indian revolution was within. It was a revolution in
private life, in the tenor of emotions and the nature of
human relationships. The very fabric of Indianness – the
meaning of being a husband or wife, a factory owner or
factory worker, a mother-in-law or daughter-in-law, a
student or teacher – was slowly, gently unraveling by the
force of these dreams, and allowing itself to be woven in
new ways.