NEW OLD WORLD

After several years documenting the rise of China, award-winning Indian journalist Pallavi Aiyar moved to Brussels, the headquarters of the European Union, to discover a Europe plagued by a financial crisis, and unsure of its place in a world where new Asian challengers are eroding its old and comfortable certainties. With a lively mix of memoir, reportage and analysis, Aiyar takes the reader on a romp across the continent, meeting workaholic Indian diamond merchants in Antwerp, upstart Chinese wine barons in Bordeaux, Sikh farmhands in the Italian countryside, and Indian engineers running offshore energy turbines in Belgium.

Journalist and author Pallavi Aiyar is the winner of the 2007 Prem Bhatia Memorial Award for excellence in political reporting and analysis for her dispatches from China. Her book Smoke and Mirrors: An Experience of China won the Vodafone-Crossword Popular Book Award for 2008. She is also the author of the critically acclaimed Chinese Whiskers. Pallavi has degrees in Philosophy, History and Media Sociology from St Stephens College Delhi University, Oxford and the London School of Economics. She was a 2007 Reuters Fellow at Oxford University.