SHASHI ON SUNDAY: Planet India: From wild dreams to plans

As that subtitle suggests, and despite her Indian name, Mira Kamdar, whose mother was Danish, is an American writing for American readers.

But her book is all the more interesting to Indians for that, because it helps answer an intriguing question: what does a sensitive, engaged American writer (''i wrote this book because i believe that India matters as never before to the future of a world in crisis") feel that her compatriots need to know about India? Planet India is a thoroughly researched depiction, warts and all, of today's India.

Kamdar has visited the country frequently since her childhood and sprinkles her narrative with personal anecdotes and references to her father's family here; but she has also put in a great deal of research, and her book bristles with statistics.

She travelled extensively through the country in the course of a year, conducted wide-ranging interviews and conversations with an astonishing array of Indians, and has taken pains to cover all the key topics that a comprehensive examination of the country demands.

It's all here — the IT boom, the television explosion, nuclear weap-ons, biotech research — and no booster of 'India Shining' can have reason to complain: Kamdar even quotes a young NRI filmmaker in New York, Smriti Mundhra, saying "Who needs the American audience? Th-ere are only three hundred million people he-re." (What's the Hindi eq-uivalent of chutzpah?)

But to Kamdar's credit, she doesn't stop with the good news. Planet India is also unsparing in its portrayal of rural poverty, foetid slums, throat-searing pollution, inadequate health-care, crippling water shortages, cities choking on themselves.

And as a writer of Gujarati descent, her own despair about the pogrom overseen by Narendra Modi and the Gujarat police in 2002 is painfully evident. Not everything is rosy on Planet India, and Kamdar is realistic about the desperation of many people's lives and the scale of the challenge facing India's rulers and policy-makers.

She could have said more about corruption (which Luce tackled more fully), and about the sterling work of social activists combating communalism, like Harsh Mander, Teesta Setalvad or Shabnam Hashmi.

Indeed, the absence of these individuals is a pity in a book whose real strength lies in her meetings with a breathtakingly diverse collection of fascinating Indians.

There are conversations with Mukesh Ambani and his wife Nita (one about business, the other abo-ut education), with the tea magnate Sanjay Bh-ansal and the Fabindia supremo William Bissell, with spiritual guru Deepak Chopra and his creative entrepreneur son Gotham, with the committed columnist Dilip D'Souza and the human rights activist Mallika Dutt — and i could easily extend this list of names through the other 22 letters of the alphabet.

(Those prominent Indians she doesn't meet, she manages to mention in her narrative, so that any notable desis not listed in Mira Kamdar's index must consider themselves unfortunate, or irrelevant, or both!)

The cumulative effect of these exchanges is a positive one: as Kamdar writes, "i met ordinary people coping with extraordinary times, and people of exceptional vision and drive who are committed to transforming India, and in so doing the world, within their lifetime." In conveying what they told her, Kamdar deserves full marks as both reporter and scholar.

There are a few unfortunate errors that the publishers will need to rectify for the next edition. Planet India leads its readers to believe that India and China have 'resolved' their border dispute, that the Indian flag still sports a spinning wheel, that Rajiv Gandhi was PM in 1983 and that Maruti was his brainchild, that Ambedkar was India's first President and that Chandrababu Naidu was a BJP party stalwart.

Kamdar also swallows the somewhat self-serving argument of the IT world that there was no meritocracy or social mobility before software began to be written by Indians. If anything, India was always a country where social stratification and caste or class discrimination could be overcome by excellence in examinations: the IAS and IFS, and for that matter the IITs themselves, are ample testimony to that.

But despite these cavils, Planet India is a worthy addition to the burgeoning shelf of serious books about 21st century India. Despite seeing all the tragedies and limitations, Kamdar comes down firmly on the side of the optimists about India.

"One day soon," she writes, "when a critical mass of the talent, the money, and the market is in Asia, a tipping point will be reached, and India will move from joining the game, or even winning the game, to inventing new rules for new games."

It's a striking thought. And the last word should probably belong to an Indian, the man behind the success of Ambootia Tea, Sanjay Bhansal, who lends Kamdar a laptop so that she can take notes more efficiently during their interview.

After describing his work and his plans, Bhansal remarks pithily: "So this is what is happening in India. My father could not have dreamt of what i am planning to do." In that simple statement lies a world of hope for our country and our people.

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• India Shining