SMOKE & MIRRORS: An Experience of China

Winner of the Vodafone-Crossword popular book award, 2008

Aiyar's work stands out for its freshness charm, and keen perceptions, expressed with honesty, fairness and empathy...Everyone with any interest in China should read this book -

Business Standard

     Smoke and Mirrors is a smart, insightful book - 
                                                              The International Herald Tribune

 

 Smoke and Mirrors: An Experience of China

China is at an historical point where tradition and modernity, communism and capitalism, chaos and control, amongst other dualities rub up against each other on a daily basis. In order to remain in power through this period of fundamental and far-reaching transformations, the Chinese Communist Party must walk a tightrope, balancing and mediating the conflicting needs, desires and aspirations of its various constituencies. For Chinese people in general as well this is a challenging period requiring enormous adjustments both psychologically and materially to rapidly altering circumstances. Pallavi Aiyar's Smoke and Mirrors spotlights these contradictions as well as the different strategies that the Party and the people deploy to manage this process of negotiation. It also aims at portraying China through Indian eyes and vice versa; a mirroring that shows up the failings and achievements of both civilizations--which are in many ways each other's alter ego. It takes a look at how people from the two sides of the Himalayas perceive each other; their prejudices and miscomprehensions as well as their similarities and shared circumstances. A combination of travelogue, reportage and memoir, this warm-hearted book is the first ever written by a Mandarin-speaking Indian foreign correspondent on China.

Smoke and Mirrors was shortlisted for the Shakti Bhatt First Book Prize in 2008 http://www.rediff.com/news/2008/jul/31shakti.htm

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Read excerpts from Smoke and Mirrors

http://yaleglobal.yale.edu/about/smoke.jsp

 

http://www.business-standard.com/common/news_article.php?leftnm=timeout&bKeyFlag=BO&autono=327291

http://www.danwei.org/books/mr_wu_and_family_from_smoke_an.php

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. 

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