 Any review of Snakes in the Ganga by Rajiv Malhotra and Vijaya Viswanathan might as well start with the final sentence, quote, India has indeed been sold out by its very own elites. It is a conclusion that the authors would have done well to remember throughout the book. Whether criticizing Harvard, MIT, Ashoka, critical race theory, equality labs, or a dozen other institutions and social movements, the same names keep coming up. Indian names. The names of top Indian industrialists and the top Indian intellectuals they fund. On the one hand, it's easy to blame Harvard for its neocolonial interventions in Indian governance. On the other hand, when Harvard is mostly taking Indian money and using its fund Indian intellectuals to train Indian postgraduate researchers, who can blame them? Yes, there's some Saudi and Chinese money thrown into the mix, but most of the money and almost all the legitimacy comes from the Indians. Malhotra tends to excuse the Indian billionaires for being well-meaning rubes who don't really understand the woke intellectual world they're funding, but surely the cat's out of the bag by now. The cat was out of the bag 20 years ago when Malhotra himself first started warning them. If India's billionaire industrialists don't know by now, it's either because they don't want to know or because they silently embrace, if not the agendas, then at least the people their money is going to fund. Stakes in the Ganga is an important book or more accurately a trilogy of books. One book on critical race theory, one on the Harvard Nexus and a final one on the Indian institutional partners. It's a book that every politically conscious Indian should read. Think of it not as a forbidding doorstopper, but as a three-in-one compendium, each book can be read separately and in fact I encourage you to start with the last one and make your way to the beginning. But whatever order you take them in, I guarantee you'll end up reading all three. Highly recommended.