Kranti Nation
India and the Fourth Industrial Revolution
Pranjul Sharma
Macmillan; 288 pages; Rs 599
Pranjul Sharma’s opening assertion seems out of sync with reality. “Revolutions are not new to India,” he writes. “Revolutions” are big-bang systemic change, often accompanied by violence. This is foreign to India. We have “revolted” often enough, against incumbent sovereigns. But accretion is more our style — changes in elites, grafted onto a near static, hierarchical, social, political, and economic architecture.
Nor is the “nation” a useful level of aggregation to study the process that goes by the moniker, of the “fourth industrial revolution” (4IR). The very concept of sovereign
