No Fools Here

Manu Joseph's Why the Poor Don't Kill Us deploys gripping prose to take an unsentimental—but not unsympathetic—look at India's impoverished classes

- Palash Krishna Mehrotra

This is a book—the title is self-explanatory—about ‘us’ and ‘them’; the Indian middle class and the working class, the rich and the poor, and the gulf in between. Manu Joseph is not trying to sell Indian poverty to the West; he is making sense of it in fat-free, ideology-free, statistics-free and curiously empathetic but unsentimental prose. It makes for gripping reading, rich in anecdote and personal insight, informed by observations from the author's time as a reporter.