A common fault that plagues writing about India is the distance between the writer and the land, a distance that is not necessarily measurable in miles but mind space. Too often, we hear accounts of India, this ever-changing, ever-same land, from people whose privilege, while giving them the knowledge and the influence to share their ideas, may not make them the best analysts of where the country has been and where it is headed.
On the face of it, Miniya Chatterji, who has degrees from Harvard and Columbia, belongs to this group. She worked abroad in investment banking and at
