This sparkling medley of articles introduces us to some aspects of India which are witnessed daily but often overlooked. The themes are richly varied: from Manjula Padmanabhan's illustrated autorickshaw tour to Ruchir Joshi's piece on the enigma that was Satyajit Ray. Mukul Kesavan strays from the campaign trail looking for the real India but finds himself in foreign parts; while Pankaj Mishra recounts the day that an electioneering Sonia Gandhi descended on Goa. Suketu Mehta portrays the pain and complexity of individual responses to the Union Carbide disaster in Bhopal and Sonia Jabbar grapples with her own sense of loss and terror as she visits the Kashmir of her childhood, the Kashmir of her imagination, which no longer exists. Kai Friese finds his bearings in the local geography of Jangpura Extension; Shuddhabrata Sengupta loiters in STD booth, eavesdropping on the trivial details of everyday lives compressed to save time and money; while Amita Baviskar finds the jetsam of globalization on the shores of Nicobar. Elsewhere also includes articles by a host of other brilliant writers, such as Amit Chaudhari, Anita Roy, Bishakha Datta, Gautam Bhatia, Latha Anantharaman, Naresh Fernandes, P. Sainath, Peter Hanley, Siddharta Deb, Sohaila Abdulati and Tabish Khair. Culled from the pages of the India Magazine, a journal that in its final years attracted some of India's best writers, this collection presents a captivating account of contemporary India.