Book Review - Rising Elephant

LokVani-LokVani: "Rising Elephant provides an encyclopedic recapping of Western press coverage of the outsourcing phenomenon. Some of the numbers are truly impressive. But, the numbers soon become numbing. Wading through page after page of anecdotes and statistics, the reader is just overwhelmed by the sheer repetitiveness of it all. Sheshabalaya offers little analysis beyond the most obvious. With such large volumes of numbers one is struck at the absence of tables and graphs.

While all eyes have been on China, the quite emergence of India over the last few years is something of note. Sheshabalaya?s book is a useful journal that addresses India?s growing strengths from multiple angles. One should commend the author for maintaining a good filing / indexing system of newspaper and magazine clippings relating to offshore outsourcing over the past few years, and doing a masterful job at cutting and pasting these to create Rising Elephant. With the official U.S. doctrine that no other power be allowed to emerge that could threaten this country?s global hegemony, one wonders how this country will react to this looming threat to neocon dreams of permanent world domination. India and China together would be enough to put them off their porridge. But that?s the subject of another book.

Vinod Muralidhar lives in constant fear of being outsourced out of his job, in Lexington, MA. "

Book Review: Rising Elephant. By Ashutosh Sheshabalaya. Common Courage Press; 322 pages; $24.95.