Author(s): Michael Farthing

Stories / Narrative

Finding India is an exploration of the development of independent, democratic India over the last fifty years through the eyes of an English doctor. During this journey, which was driven by study and work, not travel or tourism, the author is led into the pressing issues of the day--politics, health, education, and the economy, and the subsequent fiction, film, and fine art inspired by this ancient nation as it reemerges in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Finding India focuses more on people than the place itself, revealing personal experiences of colonialism, poverty, and caste.
 
The story begins in an isolated mission hospital in an impoverished village in South India as man took his first intrepid steps on the moon and ends more than forty years later, in the same hospital, as India declares itself as one of the fastest growing world economies, a leader in information technology and manufacturing, and a nuclear power with its own space exploration program. A personal story spanning half a century and accompanied by 125 illustrations, Finding India is an attempt to understand the present by gazing back in time through the eyes of an amateur.