Fifty Year Road: A Personal History of India from the MidSixties Onward

An everyman flair makes history most authentic and intensely gripping. Nothing captures more gnawingly the acute scarcity in the wake of two successive warswith China in 1962 and Pakistan in 1965than the lengthening lines outside ration shops. Fifty Year Road is Bhaskar Roys look-back moment, but more crucially, its the less-focused account of India that often gets overlooked by historiographers.The Naxalbari uprising, in perspective, was the first and fiercest far-left challenge to the Indian state, born out of deep disillusion of the republics first generation with the robust dream come crashing. Each of the subsequent upheavals has had untold sides too: the Bangladesh Liberation War, the 1974 rail strike, the Emergency, Indira assassination, Rajiv Gandhi years, economic reforms, Ayodhya demolition, Sonia Gandhi and Manmohan Singhs stewardship of the UPA, and Narendra Modis inexorable ride to power.Because its an ordinary mans memoir, the narrative gets intertwined with the Indian chronicle. The big and powerful amplify their lives and achievements; a journalist captures the tone and tension of his times. The book pulsates with the authors emotions and the nations pain and possibility as well.