Memoir night. In Marrying Anita: Quest for Love in New India (Bloomsbury, 2008), Anita Jain, a thirty-something New Yorker frustrated with Western dating norms, travels to Delhi with the goal of finding a husband using a somewhat more traditional method only to stumble upon a New IndiaÑa vibrant cosmopolitan place where instead of a marriage arranged by aunties, she finds herself among a generation that enjoys bar-hopping not to mention bed-hopping, rock bands and Westernized dating. ResidencyÑand especially its first year, called “internship”Ñis an apprenticeship legendary for its brutality. Intern: A Doctor’s Intitation (FSG, 2008) is Dr. Sandeep Jauhar’s story of his days and nights in residency at a prominent teaching hospital in New York City, a trial that led him to question every conventional assumption about doctors and medicine and subsequently comment on our own misgivings about doctors and medicine today.
Anita Jain was born in New Delhi in 1973 and moved to the U.S. when she was six months old. She bounced from state to state in her early childhood which might help to explain her later peripatetic life. After graduating from Harvard University with an undergraduate degree in 1994, she worked as a financial journalist in Mexico City, Singapore, London, New York and Delhi, where she currently lives. Publishers’ Weekly praises the “world weary yet earnest voice” within Jain’s debut, Marrying Anita. Prior to its the publication, Jain wrote about her state-side dating experience in her 2005 New York Magazine piece, “Is Arranged Marriage Really Any Worse Than Craigslist?”
Sandeep Jauhar was a Ph.D. student in physics at Berkeley when a girlfriend’s incurable illness made him yearn for a profession where he could affect people’s lives directly. Working in a New York teaching hospital, Jauhar wrestled with his decision to go into medicine and discovered a gradual but deepening disillusionment with his newfound profession. Intern chronicles Jauhar’s first eighteen months in medicine, as he asks all the hard questions about medicine today that laypeople are askingÑand reaches satisfying and often surprising conclusions about the human side of modern medicine. Time magazine describes, Intern as a “wise memoir [that] takes the readers to the heart of every young physician’s hardest test: to become a doctor yet remain a human being.” The director of the Heart Failure Program at Long Island Jewish Medical Center, he writes regularly for The New York Times and The New England Journal of Medicine.
