Indian? READ it, Want to know about India? READ it, Remotely connected with India? READ it.
This book is the closest description of India I have come across till date.
The way the author has aptly presented the multifaceted nature of this country will connect with any person living in India or even has had a brief acquaintance with it. On a personal level it has laid before me the things that I knew about my country and to love what it has had to offer me. It is truly an enlightenment to weigh in the dogmas and cultures of the society you live in and decide how you are going to deal with them for a better world

Sarah Macdonald is a journalist by trade and a great observer of life around her. For example, here's her amusing comment about traffic in New Delhi: "Pedestrians are on the bottom and run out of the way of everything, bicycles make way for cycle-rickshaws, which give way to auto-rickshaws, which stop for cars, which are subservient to trucks. Buses stop for one thing and one thing only. Not customers -- they jump on while the buses are still moving. The only thing that can stop a bus is the king of the road, the lord of the jungle and the top dog. THE HOLY COW." OK> maybe it's not everybody's humor, but i really enjoyed her observations.

This is the book--the only book--that in any way prepared me for my own Indian adventure. I'd always wanted to go there, and have read a lot of Indian books, but Sarah's opening airport scene really brings the reality of the place home for you. If you're planning on going there, and want to get a nice visceral feel for things before you go, check it out. Her adventures through various religions is very interesting too, but it was her talent for description that I most enjoyed. This is really a 4.5 stars.

If at all there was a minus rating I would have given that to this book. I regret why I spent money to read this book, the writer has such narrow mind and forgets while writing that India never forced her to come and it was her choice both time. Narrow minded and as another reviewer wrote as well, don't understand why she just did not leave the country if she was so fed up. People who want to know about India then this is not the book that you would want to read. Very disrespectful, pathetically annoying writing.

I'm kind of indecisive on this one. On one hand, I admit I can understand all the negative reviews I saw before reading this book: about her being whiny, about her embellishing her experiences, and about her portraying India in a bad light. On the other hand, I feel like these reviewers must have only read a third of the book then gave up, because as I read on I felt the author transformed and dismissed the whining and degrading in exchange for falling in love with India and all its quirks. I'm still a bit skeptical that she experienced everything she did in the way she did, but hey, it made for a great story and her writing style made the read smooth yet funny.

Sarah's (!!) spiritual journey through India, which she quit her job and traveled to for love. While she hated India at first, she grew to love it as she traveled throughout, learning about its many religions.

A lot of the Indian cultures, traditions and places seemed familiar from my own trip which I enjoyed, and it definitely made me want to go back to see Jaisalmer, Kashmir, Varanasi, and Amritsar. I always love hearing about other religions I don't know a lot about, such as Zoroastrianism and Sikhism.

The only reason I'm giving this 3 and not 4 stars, is because sometimes she was too much of a negative and naive Australian, that was too dismissive of certain parts of Indian culture for my taste. But overall she tried to embrace it, and she had a good evolution of character in the end.

A patchwork goulash of India’s religions

Having visited India this year, and travelling non-stop for ten days, I was excited about reading Holy Cow. I read Shantaram by Gregory David Roberts before going, during and after coming back from India. The book goes on forever, and although it’s an excellent book I was looking for something a little lighter in Sarah MacDonald’s Holy Cow.

And true to form that’s how it started. My own son is currently backpacking around Central America and I was looking forward to reading Sarah’s adventures backpacking through India. Unfortunately I’d misread the book description, as the backpacking part briefly describes a conversation at the airport before jumping on a plane home and takes about a minute to read. That’s it.

Slightly disappointed I read on and to be fair enjoyed what I was reading. I like the Indian people and I’ve written a lot about them myself. I enjoyed Sarah’s new friends and found myself amused at the variety of myths and superstitions that make up their everyday lives. I bought a copy for my wife, imagining it was just the type of thing she’d enjoy, and I realise now that I’d jumped the gun. She’ll hate it. It will bore her silly.

I’m currently 60% through the book, which I think is equivalent to about 183 pages of a print copy, and the story is doing my head in. I don’t honestly know if I’ll be able to finish it. This is one of those books that you find yourself reading and after a page or two realise your mind has wandered and you’ve no idea what you’ve been reading.

I can’t believe that a book that started off so well can get so repetitive. MacDonald likes to write, and to be fair she’s good at it, but she’s hopeless at stringing it all together. At one stage we find her on the banks of the Ganges (which is actually a beautiful Goddess who crashed to earth from heaven with only Shiva’s dreadlocks to break her fall) for the mass bathing known as Maha Kumbh Mela and then next thing we know she’s at a Buddhist retreat and we’re not quite sure how she got there.

This is the general theme of the book. It would possibly take a lifetime to explore all of India’s religions, Gods and Goddesses, but there’s no denying MacDonald gives it a darn good try. She aims herself at a variety of meditation retreats, yoga studies, Hindu festivals. Buddhist teachings and in fairness to her she gets involved as opposed to just reading about them all. But for the reader it comes across as a bit of a mish-mash, a patchwork goulash of India’s religions, and as one dovetails into another the reader is left a bit flummoxed.

And for that reason, with regret, I can only allocate this a 3 Star rating. It deserves higher, simply because of the effort in living it and writing about it, but for readership content it doesn’t deserve a 4 Star.

I’m feeling a stab of conscience now for the low rating. Perhaps if it was a shorter book, or it flowed better, but it’s not and it doesn’t, and in all honesty I really can’t grant this a 4 Star. 3½ Stars would possibly be a better rating, but there isn’t that option.

I read this book a while ago, but I came across this while looking at reviews of the White Tiger. This is a true story of an Australian's journey into the underprivileged parts of India. White Tiger and Holy Cow tread on similar grounds - showing how poverty emanates throughout India. However, the way White Tiger portrays India is with compassion and wit. MacDonald is just cruel and stereotypical of a privileged tourist. Maybe I am bias because I see this novel written in the white man's eyes looking down on the way of life in India. However, I think there could be better ways in showing her "spiritual" journey. No wonder I forgot to add this to my goodreads list, I blocked it out!

This book was recommend to me because I read and enjoyed "Eat, Pray, Love", but unfortunately I can't say the same about this book. I was expecting more humour due in part to the synopsis of the book and the book cover. But it's not to say that it didn't have its few LOL moments. However, the whole book felt like an unorganized presentation of events with no clear reason of why the narrator was sharing things. I didn't feel any connection to the writer and therefore couldn't sympathize with her in many scenarios. Despite all that, if you are looking for a book about religious discoveries and life in India this could be your book.

Misguided, condescending, and whiny, with racist undertones. Everything you don’t want from a journalist, or any sort of travel based writer. I hated it when I read it in high school, and it has managed to age even more poorly.

This travelogue written by an Australian woman who lived in India from 2000-2002 was a perfect read for my recent business trip to India. The author first traveled to India as a backpacker in 1988 and hated it. She returns twelve years later to live with her finance while he's working for a broadcasting company. The book mainly covers her research of India's various religions and ethnicities while living there. I don't know that the book would be that interesting for someone who hadn't been to India or was planning a trip there. At times her descriptions of meditating and visiting various temples and ashrams bored me and I found myself skipping over sections. These sections are a lot like the India section of, "Eat, Pray, Love."

The first time Macdonald went to India, she loathed it and vowed never to return. But return she did, this time in pursuit of her partner, and she had to change her tune or be miserable.

Macdonald is astoundingly negative for the first twenty pages of the book -- enough so that I was left reeling for the next hundred pages, even though she was making an effort to make it work. I read this article right before reading Holy Cow, and one of the things the article says about Holtorf is that 'Holtorf advises people not to moan about countries they visit. They cannot change them, so if they don’t like them, they should stay away.' Seems like that might've been a good lesson here. (Of course, perhaps one could say the same about books...)

It's too bad, because once Macdonald gives India a chance, she learns some interesting things about it; she experiences a lot and ends up writing about the various religions she learned about. I'm glad I stuck with it; I laughed out loud at the bit about the hand twist. So...bitter first taste, got better with chewing? Or something like that.