Reversing his parents' immigrant path, a young American-born writer returns to India and discovers an old country making itself new. Giridharadas was returning to the land of his ancestors, amid an unlikely economic boom. But he was interested less in its gold rush than in its cultural upheaval, as a new generation has sought to reconcile old traditions and customs with new ambitions and dreams. Giridharadas brings to life the people and the dilemmas of India today, through the prism of his é́migré family history and his childhood memories of India. He introduces us to entrepreneurs, radicals, industrialists, and religious seekers, but, most of all, to Indian families. He shows how parents and children, husbands and wives, cousins and siblings are reinventing relationships, bending the meaning of Indianness, and enduring the pangs of the old birthing the new. Through their stories, and his own, he paints an intimate portrait of a country becoming modern while striving to remain itself.--From book jacket.