It Happened in India – Kishore Biyani, Dipayan Baishya
Born in a middle class trading family, Kishore Biyani started his career selling stonewash fabric to small shops in Mumbai. Years later, with the launch of Pantaloons, Big Bazaar, Food Bazaar, Central and many more retail formats, he redefined the retailing business in India. Incidentally, Kishore Biyani s objective is to capture every rupee in the wallet of every Indian consumer, wherever they are – an investment banker living in a south Mumbai locality or a farmer in Sangli. As large business houses enter the retail space, Kishore Biyani is not just concentrating on retail but aiming to capture the entire Indian consumption space. From building shopping malls, developing consumer brands to selling insurance, he is getting into every business where a customer spends her money.
Sacred India is a close-focus view of spirituality in India with a very God-is-in-the-details approach. Lonely Planet tackles a bafflingly large subject with admirable grace in this loosely structured, accessibly sized coffee-table book. A florid painting of Ganesh, a hundred capped heads bowed in prayer, weather-beaten flags whipped in the Himalayan wind: all are diverse glimpses of India’s spiritual cultures. India’s four major religions–Hinduism, Islam, Sikhism, and Buddhism–are gathered in an impressionistic collage of vibrant photos and text. Christianity, Jainism, Judaism, Zoroastrianism, as well as tribal religions and gurus are also covered in smaller sections. The book’s photos are lavish in color and pungently evocative–but decidedly not opulent. They excel at the intensely personal (a lotus flower, a turban-swathed camel trader, a Muslim woman reading the Quran), but their zoomed-in style sometimes falls short of capturing the sense of awe and grandeur we like to associate with religion. Sacred India offers brief glimpses of a wide-ranging and multicolored land; but unlike the fable of the blind men and the elephant, the picture formed in the mind’s eye from these richly textured details will be greater than the sum of its parts.
When twenty-something reporter Miranda Kennedy leaves her job in New York City and travels to India with no employment prospects, she longs to immerse herself in the turmoil and excitement of a rapidly developing country. What she quickly learns in Delhi about renting an apartment as a single woman—it’s next to impossible—and the proper way for women in India to ride scooters—perched sideways—are early signs that life here is less Westernized than she’d counted on.
