Highway to Swades: Rediscovering India’s Superpowers

by Bhairavi Jani

English 424 pages 1 edition

IN THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY, WHAT DOES IT MEAN TO BE AN INDIAN? In 2014, when Bhairavi Jani got into a car with three friends and drove 18,181 km across India, from the remote districts of Nagaland to the villages of Rann of Kutch and from the Kashmir Valley to the interiors of India’s Deccan she was searching for the threads that weave the people of the world’s largest democracy together. What she discovered from the many highways she took to swades form the beating heart of this book. Highway to Swades is a quest to explore and rediscover the inherent civilizational powers shared by all Indians. Jani identifies twelve such superpowers and maps out how these can be called to action for the future of the republic and its citizens. In ‘Power of Enterprise’, for instance, she explores the values that connect India’s street vendors and tech entrepreneurs of Bengaluru. In ‘Power of Nature’, she shares the unlikely bonds that bind the Changpa people of the cold desert wildlife sanctuary in Ladakh, the Khasis of Meghalaya and an Oxford-returned young woman in Kumaon. And, in ‘Power of Creativity’ she throws light on how our inherent superpower of creativity can help us build a thriving creative economy using new-age tech and AI. Through an amalgamation of data, travel anecdotes and stories of people from different corners of India, Jani intertwines the country’s past, present and future seamlessly.