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Marrying Anita: A Quest for Love in the New India | 
 enlarge | Author: Anita Jain
Publisher: Bloomsbury USA
Category: Book
List Price: $24.99
Buy New: $13.93
You Save: $11.06 (44%)
New (29) Used (9) from $13.89
Rating:  13 reviews
Sales Rank: 170154
Media: Hardcover
Edition: 1st
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 320
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.1
Dimensions (in): 8.3 x 5.5 x 1.2
ISBN: 1596911859
Dewey Decimal Number: 954.56035
EAN: 9781596911857
ASIN: 1596911859
Publication Date: July 22, 2008
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
Shipping: International shipping available
Condition: Brand new item. Over 3.5 million customers served. Order now. Selling online since 1995. Order with confidence. Code: B20081130225628T
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Product Description
Is arranged marriage any worse than Craigslist? One smart and feisty woman’s year in India looking for a husband the old-fashioned way reveals a rapidly changing culture and a whole host of ideas about the best way to find a mate.
Anita Jain was fed up with the New York singles scene. After three years of frustration and awkward dates, and under constant pressure from her Indian parents to find someone, she started to wonder: was looking for a husband in a bar any less barbaric than traditional arranged marriage? After all this effort, there had to be something easier.
After announcing in a much-discussed New York magazine article her intention to try arranged marriage, Jain moves back to India—the impoverished, backward land her parents fled—to find a husband. At age thirty-two, and well past the cultural deadline for starting a family, Jain subjects herself to a whole new onslaught of expectations. Marrying Anita is an account of romantic chance encounters, nosy relatives, and dozens of potential husbands. Will she find a suitable man? Will he please her parents, aunts, uncles, and cousins? Is the new urban Indian culture in which she’s searching really all that different from America?
With disarming candor, Jain tells her own romantic story even as it unfolds before her, and in the process sheds new light on a country modernizing at breakneck speed. Marrying Anita is a refreshingly honest look at our own desires and the modern search for the perfect mate.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 8 more reviews...
 Frustrating but entertaining December 1, 2008
For a memoir to be compelling there needs to be a modicum of introspection and insight, in addition to some talented writing to make the readers empathize with the author's life. As other reviewers have noted, this book is entertaining but frustrating.
The writing is at times just plain bad. Consequently, the narration seriously misfires during crucial scenes. Instead of drawing sympathy, the prose elicits laughter.
What is more troubling is the author's lack of understanding about herself and India. The two are interrelated, at least in this book. She regurgitates the same old cliches about India, fails to understand the role of family in Indian marriages, and is embarrassingly derisive about her parents' insights into India. The `Reader in NYC' perceptively highlighted the author's own fear of intimacy and understanding; such a level of analysis is rare in the book itself.
All in all, the book does get better in its closing chapters and there is a particularly poignant retelling of the author's break-up with one of her last suitors. Probably worth a library rental if you're really interested.
 Sex and the City goes to India November 29, 2008
When author Anita Jain mentioned "baroque absurdity" and "the tincture of caricature" in the very first sentence of the book, I braced myself for 300 pages of pomposity. Oh brother, I thought to myself, another writer trying too hard to appear intellectual and instead just being annoying.
Luckily, as the book went on, the pretentiousness decreased a bit and was accompanied by a heartfelt page-turner of a memoir recounting Jain's dating experiences in India. Her first-hand accounts of the sexual liberation among India's young people, the lingering ill-effects of the caste system, internet dating and many other topics are fascinating and often hilarious. Jain is worldly, intelligent writer. However, she does make too much of an effort to prove this. The numerous foreign phrases and multi-syllabic adjectives she sprinkles into her writing are unnecessary and distracting.
She is also brutally honest about her escapades and self-limiting behavior and at times candid to the point where you start to feel sorry for her relatives and former lovers whose dirty laundry is aired so publicly. In any case, this all makes for a very entertaining book.
As some have already pointed out here, you do shake your head in frustration at times while reading this book as you see Jain engage in the self-destructive behavior often seen among accomplished 30-something single women. She finds herself obsessed with completely inappropriate partners who treat her like crap. She drinks and smokes pot/hash with a frequency that is unbecoming someone far beyond the age of youthful experimentation (you actually start to wonder if she has a substance abuse problem). Ditto for her going out to all those trendy Delhi clubs packed with scantily-clad teens and early 20-somethings--probably not the best venue for finding true love, especially for a Harvard-educated woman in her mid-30s.
As her happily married peers can attest (fortunately, I put myself in that category), sometime in your 20s or 30s, you realize that impossible drama with good-looking but vacuous partners, getting wasted, and going out to clubs every weekend is not a long-term plan for happiness.
Five stars for your book, Anita Jain. But please, forget about that hot 20-something guy who hangs up on you and uses you for sex. Look for and allow yourself to fall in love with a grown-up who treats you with respect. I think that is what all of us ultimately want, no matter how intellectual or socially sophisticated we may consider ourselves.
 Marrying Anita November 23, 2008
I picked up this book on a friend's recommendation and I must say I enjoyed it immensely. Jain is an excellent writer and manages to get across her thoughts and emotions almost effortlessly. Her honesty is commendable and makes her very human and easy for the reader to relate to her. There are many poignant moments in the book that highlight the struggle for her in finding her mate, and also make you wonder why it should be such a struggle. The story is compelling and fast paced keeps you turning the pages. I also loved her descriptions and insights into the "New India". I left Delhi as a child and haven't spent much time there since, so it was fascinating for me to read her experiences with the new "modern" India.
 Disappointing! October 20, 2008
1 out of 2 found this review helpful
I found the book in the travel writing section with the likes of Naipaul and thorax. I was intrigued, wanting to know more about lives of young people in contemporary Delhi. Unfortunately this book is about the boring love life of the author than about the intriguing life and loves of the people she encounters in her years stay in Delhi. She wants the world to know her story but the world could care less. The reader is subjected to the tedious travails of a woman whose ego knows no bounds. She has no original insight and at one point states that she had an epiphany. Well most people who have visited India have that epiphany two hours after landing there, but it took her all of six months to figure that one out. I wish she had written more about some of the interesting people she encounter like struggling play write vikarm, etc. Her prose skewers dangerously close to pretensions, she drops a lot of "bon mot" "deus ex machina" Pas de deux We get it you went to Harvard and still remember all the words you memorized for your SAT. Don't get me wrong, I'm not knocking pretensions writing, given the right subject matter they work, but this book is about a woman who supposedly goes to Delhi to find a husband but all she does it make out with twenty something guys, smoke dope and have sex with men she doesn't think is good enough for her. The book feels gimmicky. For a non fiction things just happen fall so conveniently into a classical narrative structure. As another reviewer pointed out it might have been better had she written it as a chick lit fiction? Save your money, buy books by Jumpa Lahiri, Kiren Desai, and Mani Suri. Their books are all better written and give you more of an insight into contemporary Indian.
Not what I expected September 23, 2008
1 out of 3 found this review helpful
I bought this book after finding it through a link somewhere. I'm interested in reading about what singles do to find love (although this is not my situation), and I liked the idea of learning more about Indian culture. This book was a big disappointment, however: in the end, I thought it was trashy.
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