Miranda Kennedy

In short, this book is amazing. I picked it up thinking I was going to get just a travel memoir type book, but it was so much more.

Miranda Kennedy found the soul of India and wrote from there, and wrote about her experiences in a way that those of us who have never visited India before could perfectly picture what was going on. I felt like I knew her friends, Geeta, Parvati, Radha, Maneesh, Usha, Azmat. And although their lives are very different from mine in many ways, we are all the same, show more wanting and desiring the same things.

I don’t want to assume that this book depicts totally what life is like in India, I don’t want to make that generalization. But I do think it gives us a closer glimpse through Kennedy’s life there. The contradictions, like Parvati, who was a whiskey drinking, smoking, foul mouthed journalist, modern in many ways, yet secretive about her relationship with her boyfriend; Geeta, struggling between a traditional and modern life and which she really wanted, that turned out to be somewhere in between.

Also, in my naiveté and ignorance, I had no idea that the caste system was still in effect and so powerful. I am embarrassed at my lack of knowledge at this, and reading about what it is like to be of a lower caste, like Maneesh, and your whole life never being able to do more than dispose of waste and dead people, to never hope for more. Another shocking fact from Kennedy: one woman dies by fire every hour, mostly daughter-in-laws killed as bride burning, or dowry deaths. When I read this, I had to put the book down for a moment. Just thinking about this gives one pause. How tragic and sad and horrible. There just aren’t words.

Sideways on a Scooter was not all about the parts of India that they might not want to advertise though. There is a greater sense of community, it seems to me, at least where Miranda lived. She belonged to a gym for women, where the women mostly sat around and talked to each other, sharing their knowledge and learning from the others. The gym owner found herself researching topics for the women that they didn’t have access to, to help them out- regarding everything under the sun. It was an outlet for them to relax and be themselves.

This book was just so much, I can’t begin to scratch the surface. I think this is a book anyone should read, I loved every bit and when it ended, I felt a little sad- my journey with Miranda had ended, and with that ending, so did the lives of the women in the book, who shine through the pages and words capturing the reader so that we want to know more about them. I hope they are all doing well. show less

When I first stumbled across this book, I was expecting a one-country remix of the hugely popular Elizabeth Gilbert memoir Eat, Pray, Love. The subtitle “Life and Love in India” makes it sound a bit like another cliche rendition of the “American girl has heart broken, moves abroad, meets new people, finds self, and then finds love again” travel memoir that publishers have been snatching up lately. So let’s make this clear from the get go: Sideways on a Scooter is not that sort of show more book and to try to lump it in that category is to do it a great disservice.

This is less a story about Miranda Kelly looking for love and more about the role of love (or lack thereof) in the lives of Indian women. A professional journalist, Kennedy moved to Delhi in the years after the attacks on September 11. Seeking to exercise her independence and cut her teeth as a foreign correspondent, Kennedy immediately finds that even the most straightforward task--finding an apartment--can be complicated as a single woman in India. And it is through this lens of being female that Kennedy offers some of her most intriguing insights into modern life in India.

Through her own experiences and those of the female friends that she makes and servants who come into her life, Kennedy explores the issues of dating (and the rise of online dating) and marriage, the depictions of females in Bollywood films, the role of fashion (traditional vs. Western), the expectations held for women by their own families and those they marry into, and the limitations placed on them by caste distinctions and society. Each of these topics is more revealing than the last. Whether she is discussing the stigma attached to having “boyfriends” or getting divorced, the deep prejudices that still divide society, or the restrictions placed by society on unmarried women, Kennedy has much to tell. And I found that as a reader, I had much to learn from her.

So much of what we hear today about modern India is focused on call centers or the technology explosion in Bangalore. Seeing how the day-to-day plays out in the rest of the country will fascinate anyone who loves to travel and see how people live around the world as well as anyone who is interested in international women’s issues. Sideways on a Scooter is a very accessible and readable glimpse into life, especially as a woman, in the world’s largest democracy. show less

This was a better book than a lot of the "American abroad" memoirs I have read. First, Kennedy was an adult when she went to India. Second, she is very knowlegable about the country, the culture and the people. Third, she really made the effort to connect with people, and the stories she shares illustrate the different experiences that Indian women have. (I contrasted the book mentally with "Marrying Anita," where the Indian-American author had none of these traits, and seems to have learned show more nothing from the experience.)

Kennedy tells not only her own story, but the stories of several women she got to know in India. She shows how being a woman has limited their choices, and how her own wider choices haven't necessarily made her any happier. She gets frustrated and angry, but never judgmental, and never looks down at the women she is writing about. show less

This is a fascinating, insightful book—as gripping as a good novel—because it gives the reader an intimate glimpse into the hearts and minds of several Indian women navigating their lives in a country that’s still bound by caste and tradition but modernizing at a dizzying pace. There’s lively, charismatic Geeta, a “modern girl”, who is nevertheless torn between hoping for a marriage arranged by her parents and finding herself a love match. Parvati, another highly opinionated show more friend of author Miranda Kennedy, chain smokes in spite of its stigma and has more contemporary notions about caste, love and marriage, but because of her unique situation these ideas are influenced by living in a reality that is very different from that of most Americans. Besides these friends, Kennedy had two household servants whose lives she becomes deeply involved in, one a proud but poverty stricken Brahmin from India’s highest caste and the other a Dalit or “untouchable” from what has traditionally been the lowest rank in Indian society. We also meet the friendly Muslim and Hindu women at the fitness center Kennedy frequents who are generally more interested in having a chance to relax and socialize than they are in exercising.

Miranda Kennedy met these women and became part of their lives while she lived in Delhi for more than five years. She had dreamed about India, and wanted to go there herself, for most of her life. In her family that journey had become something of a tradition since first her great-aunt Edith traveled there as a missionary and later her hippie parents wandered around the subcontinent. When the September 11 attacks happened Kennedy was a radio reporter in Manhattan and she spent weeks sleeping, eating and working at the studio, which was just a few blocks from the World Trade Center, afraid that if she left the NYC police would not allow her back in. Afterwards, burnt out on hourly news reporting, and wanting to follow the story in a more in-depth way from Afghanistan she managed to get a small grant to train radio reporters in South Asia. It wasn’t much money, just enough to get her started and after that she had no guarantee of work.

Everyone advised her to wait, and work her way up to be a foreign correspondent within the system, but like her peripatetic family before her Kennedy felt the need to shake her life up and go somewhere she hoped she could become her fullest, most interesting self.

With Delhi as her home base Kennedy reported on some of the biggest South Asian stories of the time, including the war in Afghanistan, unrest in Pakistan and the 2004 tsunami, but it isn’t her adventures as “super reporter girl” that make up the bulk of this volume. It’s Kennedy’s account of her struggle to find the right balance between work and love, and the way that quest was deeply and surprisingly influenced by the Indian people, especially the women, that she became close to, that is the larger and far more fascinating part of the book.

This is the second book written by a female NPR reporter who spent time living in South Asia that I’ve read in the last few months, and I also highly recommend Lisa Napoli’s book on Nepal, Radio Shangri-La. show less