We are like this only ANVAR ALIKHAN A collection of delightful essays on India, and Indian-ness. Mother Pious Lady, Santosh Desai, HarperCollins, p. 380, Rs. 399. What is it that defines our Indian-ness? What is it, exactly, that unites us — variously Punjabi, Malayali, Gujarati, Bengali or whatever — into a single nation-state? A difficult… Read more »
Indefinable middle class Market researchers attempt to ‘crack’ this inscrutable constituency of an India whose consumption potential can redefine the economic world order By Rita Kothari Posted On Thursday, July 29, 2010 at 02:36:20 AM Those of us who have grown up in the India of the seventies and eighties would know what it is… Read more »
Many days in the life of middle-class India MEERA RAJENDRAN Mother Pious Lady: making sense of everyday india Santosh Desai. Mother Pious Lady, Making Sense of Everyday India, provides a fantastic insight into the daily life of the middle-class Indian. ‘Where Do We Come From’, the first section, a collection of pieces on our ‘Indian’… Read more »
A cheat-sheet for dealing with Gen-X Indians (several variants of the truth exist), June 28, 2010 By S.Yogendra This is an amusing yet thought-provoking, insightful yet confounding, and relentlessly introspective, with hints of self-flagellation, book. The title is a nod to the specialised language used in the very specialised Indian area of matrimonial ads that… Read more »
Beyond the Age of Paisa Vasool By Shiv Visvanathan Desai traces India’s move from asocialist republic of scarcity to astate of bounty The study of popular culture as a genre has produced some wonderfully creative writers. One thinks of Ashis Nandy, Patricia Uberoi and Vijay Pershad. Probably the most playful of them is Santosh Desai…. Read more »
A 30-year survey of the urban Indian charts our ‘progress’ from the days of Chitrahaar to the present Raja Menon Articles strung together into a book are generally avoidable but Santosh Desai has put together his weekly ‘City City Bang Bang’ columns into a hilarious chronicle of urban India, and the way we Indians… Read more »
Pleasures of boredom One of my favourite social commentators is Santosh Desai. He recently published a wonderful book called Mother Pious Lady. It is a huge collection of essays, each a little fragment which captures the story of everydayness in India. Desai’s book is about daily events. What he chronicles with particular poignancy is the… Read more »
Santosh Desai is a social commentator and writer of the newspaper column. He heads Future Brands and was formerly president of the advertising agency McCann Erickson. In this, his first book, Mother Pious Lady, Desai discusses how the Indian middle class is emerging from the folds of its past, thereby requiring fresh analysis. This transition,… Read more »
Typically Middle Class Santosh Desai is a top-of-the-class ad guy, no doubt about that. And he lives up to the expectations with a series of essays that entertain, surprise and evoke nostalgia. Santosh Desai is without doubt one of the most intelligent, articulate and insightful advertising/marketing professionals in India today. In the Sargasso Sea of… Read more »
We are still like this only The collection of bite-sized commentaries covers well-worn ground, but does so with joy and hope Sidin Vadukut When I began reading Santosh Desai’s Mother Pious Lady, I expected a somewhat Indianized version of Freakonomics or even Paco Underhill’s Why We Buy. Both books, somehow, sought to first state the… Read more »
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