A provocative, humorous, searching and deeply humane portrait of India Mark Tully is incomparable. No foreign commentator has a greater understanding of the passions, the contradictions, the charms and the resilience that constitute India. In India in Slow Motion, Tully and his colleague Gillian Wright delve further than ever before into this nation of over one billion people, attempting to unravel a culture that, famously, has always resisted unravelling.

India in Slow Motion is the account of a journey that for Tully and Wright has no true beginning or end. Covering a diverse range of subjects—from Hindu extremism to child labour, Sufi mysticism to the crisis in agriculture, the persistence of political corruption to the problem of Kashmir—this book challenges the preconceptions others have about India, as well as those India has about itself.

India is often depicted as a victim of forces too wild to be controlled—of post-colonial malaise, of religious strife, of the caste system, of a corrupt bureaucratic machine. India in Slow Motion refutes this, probing into the heart of the Indian experience and arguing that change is possible and that solutions do exist. In the process it brings the country and its people brilliantly alive.

About the Author
Mark Tully (born 24 October 1935 in Calcutta, India) was the Chief of Bureau, BBC, New Delhi for 22 years. Schooled in England, he stayed mostly in India covering all major incidents in South Asia during his tenure. He was made an Officer of The Order of the British Empire in 1985 and was awarded the Padma Shree in 1992, a rare distinction for a non-Indian. He was knighted in the 2002 New Year Honours. In 2005 he received the Padma Bhushan.

Tully is the son of a wealthy accountant employed at the British Gillander Corporation in Kolkata. He was brought up by a strict European nanny and did not come to Britain until he was ten. "England struck me as a very miserable place", he later recalled, "dark and drab, without the bright skies of India".[citation needed] He was educated at the independent Marlborough College and at Trinity Hall, Cambridge University, where he read History and Theology.

After Cambridge, he considered becoming a priest in the Church of England but abandoned his vocation after just two terms at Lincoln Theological College admitting later that he had doubts about "trusting [his] sexuality to behave as a Christian priest".