Rating: 
Summary: An Essential Book for Travelers to India
Review: This book is a must-read for those travelers bound for India, especially for those seeking enlightenment. I lived in Varanasi for a year, and I met many travelers who believed that India was some sort of textbook Hindu holy land. These people lived in their ideas, creating a shield around them that kept real India out. Karma Cola helps show that India isn't a book-ideal made up of gurus and yogis performing divine-inspired miracles on every street corner. It shows that India, like any other country, is made up of people: helpful people and crooks, prude people and perverts. If you go to India, don't go there to experience some sort of religious miracle. Go there to see real India and meet real Indians, and read this book before you go!
Rating: 
Summary: This book is not good.
Review: This book mocks europeans and americans who have earnestly gone to India to seek out "enlightenment" and an element of spirituality that they think is lacking in their home cultures. Gita Mehta employs all sorts of cliches and negative stereotypes to depict this class of "foreigner" in India. This is not a very challenging literary task. Her language is as slick and taught as advertising text. Sometimes clever, but more often simply rank and mean, Mehta indulges in trite pseudo subaltern "slamming" of hippies and spiritual seekers. I wonder what Mehta's reaction would be if an American author started penning stories of the immature, body-stenched, fashion impaired Indian immigrants who flock to America to shop in outlet malls and stuff their cheap luggage full of cheaper nick-nacks for the glass bureaus back in Delhi and Dehra Dun... Everyone is looking for something: Westerners look for something spiritual in India / Indians look for something material in the West. And you are looking for my opinion on this book: dont waste your time with this one -- go buy a Rushdie novel you don't already have.
Rating:
Summary: An excellent book on the "other" perspective.
Review: This is an excellent book for those who want to know what "sensible" South Asians think about the appropriation and manipulation of their culture. I'm sure that it would seem rather acerbic to those who control the discourse on culture and identity but every once in a while a book comes along and gives voice to the perspective of the "other." Those of us who have seen their karma, their food, their noserings, their clothes and their cultural, religious and national symbols reinvented, recycled and resignified will appreciate this book as an attempt to point out the folly of such doings. For westerners, this is like looking in a mirror that does not lie.
Rating: 
Summary: Decent but nothing special
Review: While Ms. Metha is an extremely talented writer I find it distracting to have to wade through her obvious attempts to describe every minute detail to the reader. It gets to be too much. This is a nice book that offers (too much) description and a very one sided view of India. She's writing for an American audience and it's as though she wants them to laugh at the customs and norms in India. This is not my favorite book on india or even by the author. This is a middle of the road book as far as I'm concerned. I don't hate it, but then again I don't love it either.
Rating:
Summary: Witty at times, cynical at others
Review: Written so as to remind each of us that there's a sucker (or seeker) born every minute, Mehta's book shows us how easy it is to fool gullible Westerners looking for enlightenment, and that there's a big difference between open-hearted curiosity and gullibility. Westerners created a market for gurus, and India filled it. But somewhere among the amusing anecdotes that Mehta relates in a clucking tongue there's a tale that's really rather sad. On the whole, I enjoyed the book and found it witty and amusing, but thought it was perhaps a little satisfied at its own superiority. For anybody thinking about going to India to "find themselves," it would be a good primer.
| 
