Middle class in India and China

A review of Rana Dasgupta's Capital and Evan Osnos' 'The Age of Ambition': In both India and China, the growing middle class is in trouble  (Just finished the first and startin on the second) "Medicine is only one area where the state has stepped back from the lives of Delhi’s middle class. Its main role now, Dasgupta believes, is to keep the poor at bay. That vision in and of itself is nothing new. What is new, though, is Dasgupta’s belief that it isn’t temporary or simply a case of growing pains. He sees Delhi as a place where flourishing wealth and the state have stopped lifting its citizens out of poverty.

In that way, Dasgupta’s vision of Delhi is not much different from the one Evan Osnos offers of China in Age of Ambition ($31, Farrar, Straus and Giroux). Osnos, who spent eight years reporting from Beijing for the Chicago Tribune and The New Yorker, presents a much less desperate and angry view than Dasgupta. But his book is, in its own way, no more optimistic."