India

Book excerpt: Sometime early in the twenty-first century India will overtake China as the most populous nation in the world. For all its size and importance, India is a relatively unknown nation to the rest of the world, trapped in its own self-absorption, suspicious of the outside world, unwilling to interact as a nation among nations. Torn by racial violence and conflict, impoverished, ardent, mystical, religious, exciting, dangerous, and powerful - India is all of these things and more. Barbara Crossette gives us a brilliant short introduction to the world's largest democracy. In Part I, she looks at the inner self and tries to draw some general conclusions for the uninitiated on the nature of Indian myth and psychology. Part II deals with daily realities - the violence of contemporary Indian society, problems of ethnicity, caste, and religion, the plight of children, bureaucracy in sports, the darshan effect, and the growing power of the secular middle class. Part III treats politics: the problems of political history and self-definition, India and its neighbors, and the relationship between the United States and India. An afterword looks, tenuously and tentatively, toward India's hope for the future.