Anita Jain

In this memoir, Indian-American journalist Anita Jain discusses her attempts to get married. She tries living and dating in New York City, and when that doesn't work, she decides, pretty much on a whim, to move to New Delhi and try.

My main problem with this book is that she gives her own experience a lot more weight than I think it deserves. She paints a picture of her experience as a lens for understanding the "New India," but it doesn't really carry that much weight. This is a well-written personal memoir, that sheds some light on her family story, but I didn't really see it doing more than that.

My secondary problem was that I just didn't have a lot of sympathy for her. She wants to get married, while pursuing random sexual encounters with a variety of men. She has a very casual attitude towards sleeping with just about anyone she comes across. Granted, from what I could tell, a lot of this sleeping was just that, sleeping. However, she did move into casual sexual relationships quickly and didn't seem to connect any of that with her difficulties in marrying. She also describes meeting men that she did like, and making almost no attempt to meet them halfway - over spending (in what is still a poor country), sticking her feet out the window and singing drunkenly on a first date, etc. I don't know why she thought that her behavior was going to attract someone serious about a lifelong partnership.

To be fair, she does somewhat acknowlege this, and her ambivalence about a lot of male-female interaction. As I said, it's well written, but not much more than that.… (mehr)