KEY POINTS:
MARRYING ANITA
By Anita Jain
Bloomsbury, $37.99
Anita Jain is looking for a husband. She's travelled the world, established a career in journalism and now she wants to settle down. The trouble is Jain, an Indian-American, lives in New York, where the competition for suitors is fierce and most men are commitment-shy. So she hits on two ideas. One is to go back to India, the country her parents left in search of a better life when she was still a baby, and the other is to write a book recording her search for a marriageable man.
The result is an amusing account of one woman's dating miss-steps as well as a fascinating look at the new India, a country gripped by cultural and economic change.
Jain is in an interesting position when she returns to Delhi. She's not quite Indian but she's not quite foreign either. This gives her an entry into all aspects of Indian life, plus an outsider's perspective on what she sees.
It quickly becomes apparent that the new India is a country of stark contrasts. In Delhi, young women sip cocktails in trendy nightclubs, and less than an hour's drive away their counterparts are still living the traditional life, preparing food, caring for children and rarely leaving the confines of the family house. In a climate like this Jain finds it just as difficult to form a relationship as it had been in New York.
There's great comedy and pathos to be found in Jain's depiction of her California-dwelling parents who, fearful their daughter will be left on the shelf, spend their time combing the Indian matrimony websites and taking out newspaper ads for a husband.
Jain goes along with it. She believes that the Western way of finding a partner is failing her and wonders if maybe her parents are right about an arranged marriage being a more reliable route to happiness.
Jain is upfront about her loneliness and her promiscuity, and honest enough to make it easy to see where she's going wrong in her search for a modern Indian man. She's too full-on and too demanding - if a man doesn't have a good income, a perfect command of English and a willingness to share in the housework he need not apply. We'd all be single if we insisted on that.
Still, Marrying Anita is not just another fluffy chick-lit read. It's a smart girl's look at the social fabric of today's India, an absorbing, informative and fun read.
