"This is, quite simply, the best book about India today." - Fareed Zakaria, host of CNN's Fareed Zakaria GPS and author of The Post-American World

Foreign Policy managing editor and former CNN South Asia bureau chief Ravi Agrawal takes listeners on a journey across India, through remote rural villages and massive metropolises, to highlight how one tiny device - the smartphone - is changing all facets of Indian life.

The rise of smartphones, and with them access to the internet, has caused nothing short of a revolution in India. In the West, technological advances have progressed step-by-step, starting with landline phones. But the vast majority of Indians, particularly low-income and rural citizens, have leapfrogged straight to the smartphone era, disrupting centuries of tradition and barriers of wealth, language, literacy, caste, and gender.

As always with India, the numbers are staggering: in 2000, 20 million Indians had access to the internet; by 2017, 465 million were online, with three Indians discovering the internet every second - mostly on smartphones. The results are felt in every sphere of life, upending traditions and customs and challenging conventions. Nothing is untouched, from arranged marriages to business start-ups, as smartphones move the economy from cash-based to credit-based. Internet access has provided greater opportunities to women, but it has also meant that pornography has become more readily available, and fake news more widespread. Under a government keen to control content, it has created tensions. And in a climate of nationalism, it has fomented violence and even terrorism.

The influence of smartphones on "the world's largest democracy" is nonetheless pervasive and irreversible, and India Connected reveals both its dimensions and its implications.

Read by Manish Dongardive, a seasoned voice artist and audiobook narrator, and the first Indian to win the prestigious Voice Arts Award.