"India is just a geographical expression; it is as little land as the equator," said Winston Churchill about this vast subcontinent. Shashi Tharoor attempts, as he himself puts it, to approach this country where eighteen major languages and twenty-two thousand dialects are spoken, which has over a billion inhabitants of diverse ethnic backgrounds, where the majority of people painstakingly extract their food from the soil, while a few develop more sophisticated software than elsewhere in the world. Just as informative as it is passionate, he writes about post-independence India, about today's pluralistic state, "in which nothing can be taken for granted.".