How India Became America

Ruth Fremson/The New York TimesShoppers in the Express Avenue mall, the largest in Chennai.

“Another brick has come down in the great wall separating India from the rest of the world,” Akash Kapur writes in the Sunday Review of The New York Times about Starbucks and Amazon entering the Indian market. “Amazon has already started a comparison shopping site; Starbucks plans to open its first outlet this summer.”

“For me, though, the arrival of these two companies, so emblematic of American consumerism, and so emblematic, too, of the West Coast techie culture that has infiltrated India’s own booming technology sector, is a sign of something more distinctive,” Mr. Kapur writes. “It signals the latest episode in India’s remarkable process of Americanization.”

I grew up in rural India, the son of an Indian father and American mother. I spent many summers (and the occasional biting, shocking winter) in rural Minnesota. I always considered both countries home. In truth, though, the India and America of my youth were very far apart: cold war adversaries, America’s capitalist exuberance a sharp contrast to India’s austere socialism. For much of my life, my two homes were literally — but also culturally, socially and experientially — on opposite sides of the planet.

All that began changing in the early 1990s, when India liberalized its economy. Since then, I’ve watched India’s transformation with exhilaration, but occasionally, and increasingly, with some anxiety.

Mr. Kapur concludes by saying, “India’s Americanization” has been a “wonderful thing” as it has begun the “process of dismantling an old and often repressive order.” But he worries about what will replace that order. “The American promise of renewal and reinvention is deeply seductive — but, as I have learned since coming back home, it is also profoundly menacing” he writes.

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