I’ve just finished Sanjeev Bhaskar’s book accompanying his BBC ONE series last year. He travelled around India with a camera crew in search of two things – the old India in which his parents had grown up and of which he heard tales as a child, and the new India,  a centre of technological innovation and global commerce.

I must say after seeing the TV programmes, I was a bit disappointed with the first half of the book. He seems to travel from city to city, just telling the reader what’s there. But when he gets into the social, religious and political history of India in the C20th, it gets much livelier and his prose becomes more emotional. At the time of Partition in 1947 his parents were part of the huge migration from Pakistan into what we now call India. Although he wasn’t born at the time, it’s an event which has clearly remained in the memory of his family. This, and many other occurances, make for an emotionl and personal book, sensitively written.