From Hindu notions of dirt, South Asia's preference for women leaders to patronage in democratic politics, Dipankar Gupta resolves many of the paradoxes of contemporary India in this book. In the process, he issues a damning indictment of the "westoxicated" elitist Indian middle class, and shows how unmodern the people of this class are in the very areas in which they are considered to be modern. A brilliant and chilling treatise on the hypocrisy and vanity of the Indian middle class, and its pathetic attempts to cloak its traditional ways in superficial modernity.