The book delves into the feelings, emotions and travails as felt by some of the administrators, writers,social activists and reformers who have ';experienced ' India at close quarters.Curzon, Annie Besant,EM Forster, Chris Isherwood and finally Gandhi's experiences are chronicled in detail.The book tries to provide the reader with an understanding of India that is gleaned from the spiritual and pyschological processes of these visitors and tries to enunciate a depth of feeling. These 'outsiders'twist and turn at every corner in India and the reasons for their doing si might infuse an Indian to think more deeply , and accord the foreigner with a more intimate view of the seething cauldron that answers to the name of India.

I admit I may have been mildly intoxicated before I read this book - intoxicated on Western Buddhism and New Age philosophies that legitimize themselves by associating themselves with Indian religions. This book sobered me up. Paine indicates that much of what many of us have mistaken for pure distilled India is really a hybrid mutation of India and its European interpreters and visitors. I honestly feel I came away with a much better understanding of characters like Madame Blavatsky, Krishnamurti, and Ghandi. There is also a great deal of material addressing individuals who adopted a homosexual lifestyle including E.M. Forster and Christopher Isherwood. I might wonder if Jeffery Paine is himself practicing homosexuality given the amount of time spent on the topic. (In fact, if he isn't, it would be a bit annoying.) The representation of this group seems a bit disproportionate but it may indeed be the case that a disproportionate amount of the Europeans experimenting with India in the early 1900s were of this group - well at least the ones that got famous. (In which case I shouldn't be so annoyed).

Certainly India has played a part in our present culture albeit in a roundabout and almost covert way. Paine's book suggests that it was more as a catalyst than a direct effect. A place to which people embarked on holy quests and often did not find what they expected. If you have read a few new age books that swear allegiance to Indian philosophy and religion and are feeling a bit tipsy, or if you have an interest in the psychological history of the waning British empire and India as the British empire waned, I highly recommend this book.

I never would have thought of the theme of this book, but once immersed in it, found it totally engrossing. India has been the great seed bed for many Western thinkers. This is an exciting way of seeing the relationship between India and the U.S...and a well-documented account of it with fascinating stories.

this book is a collection of contemporary (roughly the past 25 years or so) poetry from around the world. The book is divided into geographical sections (i.e. africa, europe,) and each section has a few poets and each poet has one or two poems presented. Now how you feel about this book will probably depend on how you feel about poetry, and your knowledge of poetry. I like poetry, am a casual reader of it, but really don't know anything about it. So if you are an English major with an emphasis on world poetry, you may think differently than i did! Overall i liked the book. i think that many of the poems were outstanding, i really enjoyed having one book that had such a wide variety of poets. i liked the fact that each area was introduced by an essay that helped set things in context, and most poets were introduced with the same type of essay. for a guy like me who doesn't know much about poetry, this was helpful. to sum up: if you are an english major i don't know how you will feel about this book, but if you are a casual reader of poetry who would like one book that contains poetry from around the world then i think you will like this.

For an anthology of that claims to be "the poetry of our world", this book has suprisingly few poets represented. The editors chose to include poetry from about 25 countries and mostly include poetry from only one author per country. But that is intentional: the editors wanted the quality and richness of the poetry to be the track their sled runs in. In doing so, they have succeeded in creating a collection that is bursting in energy and emotion, with poetry that is a pleasure to read and reflect on. It is a very strong anthology that is sure to finish very highly, if not win, any poetry Iditarod.

mr. paine has accomplished something long overdue: he has taken a fresh view of poetry, not handicapped by genre or nationality, and recast it in such a way that what we read awakens us. maybe it is not too bold to suggest that the way he juxtaposes various poets reminds us that we can share a broader, inner world. he has rescued poetry from its own gnarled roots and allowed us to see the way it flowers. this is a book intended both for people with a long love affair with poetry, but also for readers who want to draw the kind of intellectual connections that literature can offer. i strongly recommend this book. it is more than a book of poetry, it is a book of ideas and passion.

Father India is a very evocative and thoughtfully written book about the experiential travels and tribulations of the visitors that form its chapters.

I enjoyed reading the non-religious, non-philosophical, historic account thoroughly...

I found this a fascinating, thought-proving book. The author takes takes various people who were in their various ways influenced by India, and tells of the real effect India had upon them. They range from the Viceroy, Lord Curzon, through the authors Isherwood and E M Forster to Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jnr.

The common thread is that each sought something out of India, either something that their Western societies seemed unable to give them, or the culmination of their ambitions. The question is, were all of them expecting too much of India - did they, like V S Naipaul, have an "idea of India" which, when tested against reality, would lead inevitably to disappointment?

I thought that this book was very well written, and I learnt of lives of which I was largely ignorant. The main interest for me was those people who felt disatisfaction with Western society. For example, Christopher Isherwood, who was steeped in the Western Cartesian tradition of doubting everything, ended up being "so cultivated and yet so directionless". Many felt that the West had entered a phase of "despiritualized hypermaterialism". Society had moved (and indeed is still moving) beyond religion as the underpinning prop, yet has found nothing to replace it. Could India provide an alternative way forward?

Gandhi appears as something of an anomaly in the book, and yet the author holds the view that he created a synthesis of Eastern and Western thought. I was interested in the fact that Gandhi felt that the Raj had injured both Britain and India - a theme perhaps not fully explored by historians.

What struck me at the end of the book was that each of the subjects in it asked a lot of Indian culture, perhaps too much. Also, I reflected on how times have changed since the homosexual Forster felt freer in Indian society than in Britain (has the situation been reversed since Forster's time?). An end thought - is the on-going globalization moving Indian society into the same "despiritualized hypermaterialism" experienced by the West? I don't know the answer to that, but it's an interesting question to ask.

Jeffrey Paine has done a masterful job in this refreshingly new and yet thought-provoking work. His insight into the "real" India is surprising given India's diversity and the propensity for even Indian authors to miss the subtleties of the subcontinent. What comes out clearly is Gandhi's lifetime of effort from a bird's eyeview, and what Gandhi was trying to accomplish in India and in the world in general. The effect India has had on "outsiders" in the form of invaders, visitors or missionaries has been to transform them into individuals who saw something greater in themselves than before. In effect India "converts" people more successfully than scripture thumping missionaires or cannon/sword-carrying members of the barbarian party. No small wonder that Gandhi, whose life exemplifed the principle of turning the other cheek and in loving one's neighbors rejected Christianity on moral grounds! This book also offers insight into why Christianity could not spread in India like it did in Latin America...India intoxicates its visitors, either with conversion to "Indianism" or into revulsion...either way you are transformed forever. Fundamentally, all approaches to the Truth have been tried in India, from hero (messiah) worship to heroin worship and even Heroin (drug) worship in the form of either Vedism or Tantrism. People just don't find anything new in foreign religions. And this fact is amply brought out in the authors examples of Aurobindo's effort in Pondicherry, Annie Beasant work in Madras, and in Gandhi's own "ashrams". A corrolary benefit of this book is that these facts are illuminated in a masterful manner.