New York Times reporters have developed a genre of their own-what Adam Garfinkle has described as "long, anecdotal, and lyrically styled books on the subject of their most recent assignments"; he also points out that these fill the niche once held by nineteenth-century travelogues. Crossette has happily bucked this tradition and written a more modest but possibly more compelling account of India.
While not an exposé, Crossette's book does try to make up for what she finds to be the overly romantic vision many visitors have of India. In this regard, the chapter on "A Subcontinent Adrift" has special force. In it, the author paints a devastating picture of Indians fawning on corrupt foreigners like Adnan Khashoggi, of torture used against dissidents, and of psychological dependence on the Soviet Union. She shows just how ignorant Indian political and intellectual leaders are of international realities, how arrogant their prejudices, and how crude their biases. Despite "the country's miniscule contribution to international trade . . . the shallowness of its national development, and the hundreds of millions of malnourished people living on the edge of subsistence," the foreign policy elite continues to delude itself into seeing India as a power to be reckoned with in the world. At the same time, more optimistically, she finds a small number of realists-for example, Rajiv Desai, who calls for Indians to question policies "that leave India picking nuts and berries in obscure groves at the margins of the world mainstream."
