Anand Giridharadas

Anand Giridharadas (/ˈɑːnənd ˌɡɪrɪˌdɑːrəˈdɑːs/;[1]) is an American writer. He is a former columnist for The New York Times. He is the author of three books, India Calling: An Intimate Portrait of a Nation's Remaking (2011), The True American: Murder and Mercy in Texas (2014), and Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World (2018). Much of his writing has focused on India and its people.

Anand Giridharadas
Giridharadas in 2011
BornShaker Heights, Ohio, U.S.
Occupation
  • Author
  • columnist
Alma mater
  • University of Michigan
Subject
  • Culture
  • politics
  • technology
Spouse
Priya B. Parker
​
(m. 2012)​
Children2
Website
www.anand.ly

Early life and education

Giridharadas was raised in Shaker Heights, Ohio; Maryland; and Paris, France.[2][3][4] His childhood visits to extended family members in India sparked an interest in that country that influenced his later writing.[5] He attended Sidwell Friends School.[6] He studied politics and history at the University of Michigan.[7]

Career
Giridharadas speaking with Elizabeth Warren at SXSW 2019.

After graduating from college, Giridharadas moved to Mumbai in 2003 as a consultant for the global management consulting firm McKinsey & Company, where he followed the path of his father, who was a director at McKinsey. In 2005, he became a journalist, covering India for the International Herald Tribune and The New York Times.[8] In 2009, after returning to the United States, he began to write the "Currents" column for those newspapers.[9] He also writes longer magazine pieces.[10][11][12] As of 2010, Giridharadas was a doctoral candidate at Harvard University.[13] He is a Henry Crown Fellow of the Aspen Institute,[14] an MSNBC commentator, and a visiting scholar at the Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute at New York University.[15]

Seat at the Table

Giridharadas hosted the talk show Seat at the Table with Anand Giridharadas on Vice on TV. The show premiered in April 2020, and was canceled in July 2020.[16][17]

Books

India Calling (2011)

In 2011, Giridharadas published his first book, India Calling: An Intimate Portrait of a Nation's Remaking.[4] In it he discusses the increasing opportunities the Indian economy provides. He also delves into class issues, and has said, "in India, you're eternally a master and eternally a servant."[18]

In The Plain Dealer, Jo Gibson called the book "readable" and "intriguing" and Giridharadas "a marvelous journalist—intrepid, easy to like, curious."[4] In a review for The New York Times, Gaiutra Bahadur wrote, "'India Calling' has what Hanif Kureishi once described as 'the sex of a syllogism.' Full-figured ideas animate every turn. So, simultaneously, does Giridharadas’s eye for contradiction. The combination both pleases us and makes us wary—distrustful of shapely ideas, including the author’s own."[19]

The True American (2014)

In 2014, W. W. Norton and Company published Giridharadas's The True American: Murder and Mercy in Texas. The book centers on executed murderer Mark Stroman and a survivor of one of his shootings, Rais Bhuiyan. It explores Bhuiyan's forgiveness of Stroman and his campaign to save Stroman from capital punishment. At the time of the shootings, Stroman thought he was exacting revenge for the September 11, 2001 attacks, but his victims were immigrants from India, Pakistan and Bangladesh.[20]

In his review for The Washington Post, Eboo Patel wrote that the book "zooms out and illuminates the broader social context of the lives at the center"[21] but that "while plumbing the depths of Bhuiyan’s Muslim heart, [Giridharadas] misses a wide-open opportunity to get to the heart of Islam."[21] In The Wall Street Journal, Stephen Harrigan wrote that Giridharadas is "an enterprising and clear-eyed reporter and a generally smooth writer, though every 20 pages or so there appears a glistening chunk of linguistic gristle... But occasional maladroit phrases do no serious harm to his commanding narrative."[22]

Winners Take All (2018)
Main article: Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World

In 2018, Giridharadas published Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World in which he argues that members of the global elite, though sometimes engaged in philanthropy, use their wealth and influence to preserve systems that concentrate wealth at the top at the expense of societal progress. Writing for The New York Times, economist Joseph Stiglitz praised the book, writing that Giridharadas "writes on two levels — seemingly tactful and subtle — but ultimately he presents a devastating portrait of a whole class, one easier to satirize than to reform."[23]

Personal life

Giridharadas lives in Brooklyn, New York, with his wife, author Priya B. Parker.[24]

Works
  • Giridharadas, Anand (2011). India Calling: An Intimate Portrait of a Nation's Remaking. Times Books. New York: Henry Holt and Company. ISBN 978-0-8050-9177-9.
  • Giridharadas, Anand (2014). The True American: Murder and Mercy in Texas. New York: W. W. Norton & Company. ISBN 978-0-393-23950-8.
  • Giridharadas, Anand (2018). Winners Take All; The Elite Charade of Changing the World. New York: Knopf. ISBN 978-0-451-49324-8.

References
  1. As pronounced by himself in "How Donald Trump Resonates With White Male Voters" (2016).
  2. Stewart, Jon. January 24, 2011. The Daily Show. Comedy Central. Accessed February 24, 2011.
  3. Giridharadas, Anand. The anatomy of a conflict: Afghanistan and 9/11 (2002) p. vi. ISBN 81-7436-253-3.
  4. "For 'India Calling,' former Clevelander Anand Giridharadas writes eloquently of two cultures". The Plain Dealer. January 4, 2011. Accessed February 24, 2011.
  5. Sehgal, Parul. "Go East, Young Man". Publishers Weekly. December 6, 2010. Accessed March 8, 2013.
  6. Can Anand Giridharadas Fix a Broken Democracy?
  7. History Honors Symposium. Archived May 4, 2013, at the Wayback Machine University of Michigan Department of History. Accessed March 8, 2013.
  8. Selection of Giridharadas's India coverage via Google Accessed March 8, 2013.
  9. Selection of Giridharadas's "Currents" columns and other writings via Google Accessed March 8, 2013
  10. Giridharadas, Anand. "The Would-Be Prince of Port-au-Prince" July 15, 2011. The New York Times Magazine. Accessed March 8, 2013.
  11. Giridharadas, Anand. "The Kitchen-Table Industrialists" May 13, 2011. The New York Times Magazine. Accessed March 8, 2013.
  12. Giridharadas, Anand. "V.S. Naipaul: The Constant Critic, the Lover of Animals" January 4, 2011. The Atlantic. Accessed March 8, 2013.
  13. "Speakers". Harvard Asian American Alumni Association. Archived from the original on October 5, 2014. Retrieved August 9, 2014.
  14. 2011 Henry Crown Fellowship Accessed March 8, 2013.
  15. "Anand Giridharadas - NYU Journalism". NYU Journalism. Retrieved 2018-08-26.
  16. White, Peter (April 15, 2020). "Vice TV Sets Weekly News & Talk Show 'Seat At The Table' With Former New York Times Columnist Anand Giridharadas". Deadline Hollywood. Retrieved May 18, 2020.
  17. "Twitter". Twitter. Retrieved July 8, 2020.
  18. "'India Calling': The New 'Land Of Opportunity'?". National Public Radio. Retrieved August 9, 2014.
  19. Bahadur, Gaiutra (January 7, 2011). "Homeland revisited". The New York Times. Retrieved August 9, 2014.
  20. Akhtar, Ayad (May 8, 2014). "Pledges of allegiance". The New York Times. Retrieved August 9, 2014.
  21. Patel, Eboo (May 9, 2014). "Book review: 'The True American: Murder and Mercy in Texas' by Anand Giridharadas". The Washington Post. Retrieved August 9, 2014.
  22. Harrigan, Stephen (May 4, 2014). "Book Review: 'The True American' by Anand Giridharadas". The Wall Street Journal. Retrieved August 9, 2014.
  23. "Meet the 'Change Agents' Who Are Enabling Inequality". Retrieved 2018-08-25.
  24. Anand Giridharadas biography Anand.ly. Accessed March 8, 2013.
This article is issued from Wikipedia. The text is licensed under Creative Commons - Attribution - Sharealike. Additional terms may apply for the media files.