In 2009, after several years in China, 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 as she meets 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. In the Europe of today everything is in flux, as she discovers through conversations with Muslim immigrants struggling to define their identities, the austere bosses of Germanys world-beating companies and bewildered Eurocrats struggling to save the EU from splitting apart. Examining the diverse challenges the continent faces today among them, bloated welfare states, the accommodation of Islam, the European ambitions of Indian and Chinese entrepreneurs and the fissures that threaten to break up this union of diverse nations Punjabi Parmesan takes a panoramic look at Europes first-world crisis from a unique India China perspective.
