We have not Yet been explained

We Indians have been counted, segmented, and sold to for decades. We have rarely been explained.

These essays go looking for what the data missed - behind the one-way glass, inside the dashboards, across the table from the consumer everyone claims to understand.

They move from a red jeep in a Cuttack garden to a gas cylinder checked twice at midnight; from a magazine we thought was dead to a delivery bag that arrives in ten minutes; from what Maggi knows about a nation to a cat that no one can name. Underneath runs a single argument: this is a class defined by sufficiency that never quite becomes safety; aspiration on the surface, precarity beneath.

Part memoir, part argument, part reckoning with a profession that claims to know people but that no one knows much about.