India (66 page)

India
depends on personal voices to tell a story, starting with a Ladakhi villager whose house was to be swept away by the cloudburst of 2010, and closing with a techie who is making a unique ID card for every Indian citizen. I want to thank them all, because their words reveal something new about the past, present or future. Most are identified by name in the text and credited in the Notes, although those who are involved in politics or the sex trade have often preferred to stay anonymous. My thanks are due to all of them, and to the others who have in diverse ways helped to make this book happen, including Irfan Ahmad, Yamini Aiyar, Shaheen Sardar Ali, Peerzada Arshad Hamid, N. Bhanutej, Soutik Biswas, Judith Brown, Linda Clarke, Aaditya Dar, Elaine Davies, Meghnad Desai, John Elliott, Shehryar Fazli, Kanika Gahlaut, Mandakini Gahlot, Ram Guha, Christophe Jaffrelot, Rebecca John, Shishir Joshi, the staff of the Archive Centre at King’s College, Cambridge, Sunil Khilnani, M. R. Mahadavan, Kamini Mahadevan, Raman Mahadevan, James Manor, Saira Menezes, Lakshman Menon, Martin Moir, Siddarth Raj Pradhan, Srinivas Reddy, Sanjana, Daman Singh, Upinder Singh, Sugata Srinivasaraju and Namita Waikar. The “Family Politics” chapter was an epic piece of work: it was remarkably hard to find out how 545 people grabbed their slice of the parliamentary pie. We all know how Sonia Gandhi landed up in politics, but do you know how Lalubhai Babubhai Patel gained his foothold? Many heroes—around fifty in all—were involved in this process, and I want to thank them for making the workings of Indian democracy become clearer. Their names are credited on the complete Family Politics spreadsheet, which is available on
TheIndiaSite.com
. Some important sources (usually experienced state-level political journalists) chose to remain anonymous, particularly in India’s more scary regions. The main go-getters were Megha Chauhan (who searched out details for the north and outlying territories, and edited and fact-checked diffuse data), Arun Kaul (who created and managed the spreadsheet), Rasheed Kidwai (who mined Bihar, Chhattisgarh, Jharkand, Rajasthan and West Bengal), Mithilesh Kumar (Bihar), N. Bhanutej, C. K. Sivanandan, Rajeev Gowda and Ramu Patil (Karnataka and Kerala), Mr. and Miss Anonymous
(Gujarat), Peerzada Arshad Hamid (Jammu and Kashmir), M. Gunasekaran and Kamini Mahadevan (Tamil Nadu), Lallian Chhunga (Mizoram), Karri Sriram and Sakru Naik Banavath (Andhra Pradesh), Dhanraj Misra (Orissa) and Vidya Krishnan (Maharashtra and Madhya Pradesh). On the publishing side, I want to give thanks to Simon Winder, Ravi Singh, David Davidar, Mark Handsley and Thi Dinh at Penguin, George Andreou and Lily Evans at Knopf, and Sarah Chalfant, Andrew Wylie and James Pullen at the incomparable Wylie Agency. I am thankful for the support of Maurice French, Shivani Sibal, Akhil Sibal, Namita Gokhale, Neerja Pant, Tenzin French, Abraham French, Iris French and Meru Gokhale, to whom this book is dedicated.

Goleen, August 2010