A collection of delightful essays

A difficult question. There have, of course, been many attempts to answer it, ranging from the erudite to the glib, but none of them has been particularly convincing. A quarter of the way into reading Mother Pious Lady, however, I found myself stopping and saying to myself: Aha, so this is what it's all about; this is what it means to be Indian! Santosh Desai and I may belong to different parts of the country, different
mother tongues, cultural backgrounds, religions, ethnic strains, family backgrounds, even perhaps age-groups — all the things that might conceivably divide us — yet, reading this book was like reading my own story; it seemed to suddenly unite us, brothers under the same skin.

The book, and the typically Indian human insights it's filled with, make it the closest thing I've come across to a definitive statement of Indian-ness. This was obviously not Desai's intention when he sat down to write these delightful essays, but it's what he has, in effect, ended up doing.

Full review here Greater Kashmir

We are like this only

A collection of delightful essays on India, and Indian-ness.

What is it that defines our Indian-ness? What is it, exactly, that unites us — variously Punjabi, Malayali, Gujarati, Bengali or whatever — into a single nation-state?

A difficult question. There have, of course, been many attempts to answer it, ranging from the erudite to the glib, but none of them has been particularly convincing. A quarter of the way into reading Mother Pious Lady, however, I found myself stopping and saying to myself: Aha, so this is what it's all about; this is what it means to be Indian! Santosh Desai and I may belong to different parts of the country, different mother tongues, cultural backgrounds, religions, ethnic strains, family backgrounds, even perhaps age-groups — all the things that might conceivably divide us — yet, reading this book was like reading my own story; it seemed to suddenly unite us, brothers under the same skin. The book, and the typically Indian human insights it's filled with, make it the closest thing I've come across to a definitive statement of Indian-ness. This was obviously not Desai's intention when he sat down to write these delightful essays, but it's what he has, in effect, ended up doing.

An emerging India nestles in Desai's essays

The multitude of choices available to us today was set in contrast with memories of yesteryear, at a book-reading session of Santosh Desai’s Mother Pious Lady: Making Sense of Everyday India in Bangalore on Friday.

Theatre personality Arundhati Nag engaged the author in an animated tete-a-tete on his collection of essays, that discusses the Indian middle class emerging from the folds of the past. To name a few: from just a Chitrahaar in the 80s to children having a choice of at least 80 channels on TV; ‘The Dignity of Ultramarine’ that never made clothes white but still showed people then cared to try, ‘The Dhaniya factor’, the ‘dying window’ still fresh with memories of watching those passing by, and the heroism of self-restraint those days, when mothers said leftovers were tasty and fathers opted out of scooters, saying they loved to walk to work.

Full report here Times of India 

Today even the groom must market himself

Ad-man and MD and CEO of Future Brands speaks about consumer insights derived from fragments of everyday life as experienced by the middle class in urban India.

At the launch of his book Mother Pious Lady: Making Sense Of Everyday India, Santosh Desai, noted advertising professional and managing director and chief executive of Future Brands, spoke about consumer insights derived from fragments of everyday life as experienced by the middle class in urban India. He explains why we are obsessed with our stomachs, why a slap is the ultimate insult, and why consumers still expect dhaniya and mirchi (green coriander and chillies) free with their vegetables. Edited excerpts:

You’ve drawn from your own experiences of growing up in a middle-class Indian family. Will the book touch a chord with new consumers?
This is the thing about India, there is a certain amount of things that are changing, but our desire is to believe that nothing is. If you ask people if they are comfortable with their way of life, young or old, most would say yes. The young are not looking to redefine their lives. It’s not like 18-year-olds are moving out of their parents’ homes, they are not saying: “What is this ridiculous way of getting married?” If we really wanted a discontinuous way of life, the young could have easily walked away from the past. But they haven’t. This is a story of India as it exists, because it is continuous, in a sense it goes back to explain where this continuity comes from, to explain the present. Early anecdotal evidence shows that young people are reading it like a novel. Yes, perhaps it will strike (more of) a chord with people of my generation.

Full interview here Mint

Santosh Desai documents changing Indian middle class

The love affair of the Indian middle class with modernism “took wing with stainless steel”, says leading social commentator Santosh Desai in his new book Mother Pious Lady: Making Sense of Everyday India, a racy comment on the contemporary middle-of-the-order India.
“Stainless steel managed to meet the deeply traditional needs by being incontrovertibly modern. It was seen as pure and indestructible - the two virtues that give it pride of place in the kitchen," Desai says in the book that was launched in Delhi on Saturday.

"And yet, unlike gold, which is interwoven into custom and the ritual role of which is well-established, stainless steel has no past in India. Dubbed as 'ever-silver', in its early phases, it was clearly a modern substance, glinting with metallic hardness,” the author says, trying to encapsulate the changing Indian middle class with its morphing kitchen ware.
The Indian middle class, feels Desai, is coming out from the folds of its past and has to be seen with new eyes.

“It has greater headroom for social and economic mobility. And is now looking at the world through its senses - rather than the mind. The Indian middle class had always been uneasy about its senses because it had, over the centuries, been ruled by the mind,” Desai told IANS.

The writer, who heads Future Brands and was the former president of McCann Erickson, feels the Indian middle class would become a stronger social force five years from now with a more nuanced world view. But he adds that "it would not become a significant political force as it was still too consumed with itself”.
Explaining the objective of his book, Desai said: “Books on India tend to be big because India is a big country, but my book tries to get behind the scene to infer why the middle class feels sandwiched.”
“I have grown up in a middle class family. My father worked in a public sector company. To me, the essence of growing up as an Indian, if there is any such essence, is really in understanding what it takes to actually experience India in all its trivial everydayness,” he said.

Full report here Little About