Word: indianism
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...American businessman in Mumbai attends a fancy banquet to raise money for abused women and picks up a local woman there, to complement the underage schoolgirls he's keeping on the side. Another American man makes an elaborate, prideful point of not taking advantage of his Indian masseuse, only to find that he's being taken advantage of on every side. A backpacker pays for her room in a Bangalore ashram by teaching call-center workers to sound like Westerners - only to find that she has turned shy and well-mannered Indians into grasping and much too intimate mock-Americans...
...India, with its furious intensities, its gift for confrontation and its quirky mix of dusty British terms ("jocundity") and the latest American ambitions, might be made for him and his ironic pen. He also reminds us that few travelers can pick up a place with such casual vividness, see Indian script "like washing hanging on a clothesline", or hear both the innocence and threat in "Let we go inside, sir?" or "Having chit, madam?" India is a challenge for many visitors, and no one loves a challenge more than Paul Theroux...
...three long stories that make up The Elephanta Suite all deal with New Englanders who settle into the lulling comfort of an Indian sanctuary - a spa, a luxury hotel, an ashram - only to be drawn out of it by their conflicting desires. All three of them start slipping away from their cozy images of themselves, and begin going native on the dark side of town, even as the Indians around them are becoming more like Americans. The fact that the title refers both to a room in a fancy hotel and to a set of movements in a musical sequence...
Theroux's strength as a writer and a traveler has always come from his readiness to say and do what few of us would admit to, and it's a safe bet that these gleefully impenitent stories will not be promoted by the American Chamber of Commerce or the Indian Ministry of Tourism. Monkeys are likened to humans in the first sentence of the book, and in one story the only sympathetic creature is a murderous elephant. Pieties old and new are shot down with every politically incorrect maneuver. "If you succumbed to India's vivid temptation to generalize," Theroux...
...Hindu Indian who has been a naturalized American for many years, I have been deeply concerned by the clout and popularity of Graham. To believe that whoever receives Christ as his Saviour goes to heaven is quite acceptable to me. To say Christianity is the only way to God and heaven is outrageous...