Mr. Joshi is a fortune teller in South Delhi who depends on a green parrot to predict the future by picking out cards. When Adam Roberts visited him in 2012, Joshi declared that India was about to become the world's number one country, the most powerful nation, and that Narendra Modi would become prime minister. He also insisted that the Indian soccer team would win the 2014 World Cup.
Roberts takes Joshi's predictions and travels the length and breadth of the country from Kerala to the Himalayas, Bengal to Goa, to put them to the test. Is India about to realize its potential and become the world's greatest nation, as well as its most populous and its largest democracy? Or will the multitude of contradictions and internal rivalries thwart its moment? Filled with memorable encounters and offering a vivid sweep across the vast landscape and people-scape that India has become, Roberts shows what is perhaps the world's most vibrant nation in the full throws of its reinvention: it is a young, garrulous, confident, exuberant country that has successfully launched an orbiter to Mars but which can make the trains neither run on time nor at a speed that exceeds a modest amble.
With the flattening of China's growth, India is the world economy's most dynamic large player. India is betting that its future prosperity will cover up the fault lines of the present, and that the drive forward will allow the nation to forget the tribal and religious divisions that have brought such violence in the past, including the very recent past. Superfast Ultimate Primetime Nation is a portrait of a nation reaching for the destiny it has determined it's due.
