Rana Dasgupta Capital

Annotation

Winner of the Ryszard Kapuciski Award and the Prix mile Guimet de Littrature AsiatiqueFinalist forthe Orwell Prize, the Royal Society of Literature Ondaatje Prize and the Prix du Meilleur Livre trangerAt the turn of the twenty-first century, acclaimed novelist Rana Dasgupta arrived in Delhi with a single suitcase. He had no intention of staying for long. But the city beguiled himhe fell in love and in hate with itand fourteen years later, Delhi is still his home.Fourteen years of breakneck change. The boom following the opening up of India's economy plunged Delhi into a tumult of destruction and creation: slums and markets were ripped down, and shopping malls and apartment blocks erupted from the ruins. Many fortunes were made, and in the glassy stores lining the new highways, customers paid for global luxury with bags of cash. But the transformation was stern, abrupt and fantastically unequal, and it gave rise to strange and bewildering feelings. The city brimmed with ambition and rage. Bizarre crimes stole the headlines.In Capital, we see Delhi through the eyes of its people. With the lyricism and empathy of a novelist, Dasgupta takes us through a series of encounterswith billionaires and bureaucrats, drug dealers and metal traders, slum dwellers and psychoanalystswhich plunge us into Delhi's intoxicating, and sometimes terrifying, story of capitalist transformation. Interweaving over a century of history with his personal journey, he presents us with the first literary portrait of one of the twenty-first century's fastest-growing megalopolisesa dark and uncanny portrait that gives us insights, too, as to the nature of our owneveryone'sshared, global future.