Newswallah: Long Reads Edition

ReutersA magazine stand on a railway platform in Mumbai.

Whether it is Communist China or democratic, socialist India, corruption by top politicians seems to follow the same path, use the same techniques and yield the same results - politicians and their family members suddenly become rich as they become powerful.

In India, of course, politicians have followed similar pattern, irrespective of the party they came from. Examples include corruption in the telecommunications industry, the Commonwealth Games, the allocation of coal mining blocks and the illegal mining of iron ore. Allegations about companies promoted by Nitin Gadkari, the president of opposi tion Bharatiya Janata Party and Robert Vadra, the son-in-law of Sonia Gandhi, also follow the same patterns.

In “Hunger Stalks My Father's India Long After Starvation Ends,” the Bloomberg reporter Mehul Srivastava returns to his father's village of Auar, in Uttar Pradesh, where villagers once survived on coarse, imported wheat from the United States in the 1950s, to find their situation little improved now.

Mr. Srivastava and his immediate family escaped the plight of many of these villagers thanks to his family's emphasis on education. A “single generation of good nutrition” that he and his cousins experienced separates them from their parents, and catapulted them into the top 10 percent in India for height and health, he wrote. “In Auar, I felt like a giant, stooping through doorways, my feet dangling over the edge of my borrowed cot.”

Time Magazine's special report on India, carried a series of articles that focus ed on the overarching theme-“can the nation recover its magic?” One of the articles, by the author Akash Kapur, argues that the entire country “has been reduced to a giant dumping yard,” with plastic bags, bottles and rubber tires strewn around and the air polluted with chemicals. He writes that the “garbage crisis” is symptomatic of the “nation's troubled engagement with modern capitalism - reflecting a new prosperity and consumer boom, yet a reminder too of the terrible price often expected by that boom.”

Mr. Kapur postulates that if India wants to overcome social, cultural and environmental depravation, it needs to search for a new identity. An alternate model of development will matter deeply not only to India, but also other emerging economies around the world, he notes. “Even in the West, with capitalism in crisis and a sense of old certainties crumbling, India's search has a new salience.”