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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: $12.45
You Save: $12.54 (50%)
New (18) Used (4) from $12.45
Avg. Customer Rating:  5 reviews
Sales Rank: 34821
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 (New: Last 30 Days)
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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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:
More than a "chick book" August 21, 2008
As a guy, the title isn't something that drew me in; however, I have a keen interest in all things India, so decided to give the book a try.
Amid the amusing and often hilarious anecdotes about Anita and her escapades is a fascinating look at India in transition that goes well beyond the supposedly heavyweight but hopelessly behind-the-curve tomes such as Freidman's "The World is Flat". Jain, of Indian heritage but having grown up in the U.S. is in a unique position to take the pulse of the key demographic in the New India. Her observations are cogent and witty.
This is very good book.
 Oh So Slow August 14, 2008
1 out of 3 found this review helpful
This book is excruitiatingly slow - the narrative just drags on and on and the author and her story are really uninteresting. I only continued reading this book to learn more about the Indian culture and not because the story is good, because it's not. Who is this Anita Jain to warrant a biography/autobiography? Perhaps this book could have been fictionalized and made into chick-lit. The book is about Anita Jain and her search for a husband. Despite the title, there is no marrying and Anita doesn't even actively look for a husband; she spends her spare time getting high and talking about her life rather than living it. Anita ends up in Delhi, India when her attempts to land a guy in NYC fall short. The book doesn't encourage you to take any interest in Anita and I couldn't wait for this to end. The setting is interesting but that's about all.
 I loved this book August 14, 2008
2 out of 3 found this review helpful
I really did. First of all, the story is so charming and interesting. I was her - only not Indian - I was over 30 and not married and I wanted to be married. She gave a name to many of the feelings that I had during that period of my life.
Second, I absolutely loved her description of India - I've never been there and she made it come alive for me.
Read this book.
A woman, a world, an endless search for romance. August 13, 2008
2 out of 3 found this review helpful
This is a ridiculously readable and endlessly entertaining story of a woman who wanders the world while both sampling its sublime physical pleasures and, even more importantly, looking for an acceptable mate. Yeah, it has India in the title and the author ping-pongs her passions between New York and New Delhi, but this breezy, sexy and stunningly insightful slice of bittersweet life isn't about culture clash, really. It's all about looking for love, and all of the wonderfully nasty stuff that comes with the hunt.
Beach Read or Pulitzer Prize winner? Maybe BOTH! July 31, 2008
7 out of 12 found this review helpful
I read many novels, but I don't often take the time to write reviews of books here. Marrying Anita was so enjoyable, I am making the point to write on Ms Jain's behalf. She deserves an accolade here.
A literary koosh ball, this book is easy to read and hard to put down. I was so endeared by her trials and prevails that I really do hope a sequel is percolating in her mind. She writes with the flow of a close friend's voice, but definitely a very SMART friend. Her vocabulary is far more advanced than mine, but it never got in the way of her story.
In short, the story was a good one and very well told. Simple and sophisticated in one swift stroke. Her descriptions paint such a vivid picture, yet were never boring. And dealing with sometimes sensitive topics, she is so honest. I really respect her for voicing these thoughts we can all share, in the clear view of her Papa, who is mentioned so frequently and with such endearment.
This can be an easy finish-in-one-day beach book, or a great book club read. It has been a long time since I have been so drawn in to a book. Thank you and congratulations to Anita Jain.
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