This is history as told by a participant – Gurcharan Das, the author, is a former CEO of P&G’s India operations – but only partially a memoir. Das aims to tell the story of India’s economy since independence, weaving in personal anecdotes to make it an insider’s tale. He is a great fan of the country’s 1991 economic reforms, but this is not hard-headed economic analysis – he is carried away by the current software boom as only a man living within it could be. Still, the book puts flesh on a story that’s all too often told with dry numbers. The License Raj, the ’91 reforms, and the IT boom all come alive.