River Valley to Silicon Valley- Book Review by Stanislav Savitski

Dear Abhay,I’m about to finish reading your book. Possibly I’m its perfect reader because unfortunately my knowledge about India is far from being below average. It is really interesting to read your story first of all as a sort of introduction to other culture. Meanwhile, I feel myself not an “ordinary” foreigner completely alien to life described in your text. This is the education novel I remember from the Russian-Soviet tradition where the Enlightenment ideals and dreams remained the very essential and productive values for many decades. Surprisingly (or may be not surprisingly) one can find in your book the plot from the Realistic prose of 1930s-80s. I’m not sure that I like this tradition as such but no doubts it attracts me a great deal today when the boundary between the Socialist past and the contemporary life is evident. I’m really interested to find out how the story of education and career of the “simple man” might be told now and moreover how it may be expressed in the manner unusual from my point of view.
Best,Stanislav Savitski, Critic, St. Petersburg