SMOKE & MIRRORS: An Experience of China

Winner of the Vodafone-Crossword popular book award, 2008

Home

Welcome to Pallavi Aiyar's website.  Pallavi is an award-winning Indian journalist and author of Smoke and Mirrors: An Experience of China. After a six-year-long stint in Beijing she now lives in Brussels where she reports on Europe for the Business Standard. She is currently working on her first novel.

SMOKE AND MIRRORS: an experience of China

In her debut book, author Pallavi Aiyar delights readers with her witty account of her five-year long experience of China. As an Indian journalist based in Beijing, Pallavi has a fresh perspective on the rise of this ancient civilisation which, like its giant neighbour on the other side of the Himalayas, is grappling with large-scale social, economic and political changes.


  



Praise for Smoke and Mirrors

"Smoke and Mirrors is thoroughly entertaining and educative, written with wit and perception in a lively and evocative style. Aiyar’s observations and experiences helped me to better understand China, to which I have been an occasional visitor."
Sonia Gandhi President, Congress Party

"Spurning the usual West-centric perspective on China, Pallavi Aiyar brings a sharp assessing eye to her intractably complex subject. In brisk, often entertaining, prose, she exposes the rich paradoxes and ironies of both 'authoritarian' China and 'democratic' India."
Pankaj Mishra, Author

"We benefit from having Aiyar’s cultural vantage point and nuanced lens. She serves as a better guide to exploring those issues that don’t easily fit into the already hackneyed “Dragon vs. Elephant” cliché. And when it comes to answering that all-important question of how these countries are improving the future for their citizens, who better to help us understand than someone who knows them both with the love of a native and the curiosity of a traveler?"
Jeffrey Wassesrstrom, Foreign Policy

 

Copyright Pallavi Aiyar. All rights reserved. 

Web Hosting by Yahoo!