Capital: A Portrait of Twenty-First Century Delhi
Rana Dasgupta
Language: English
Pages: 496
ISBN: 9350297930
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
SHORTLISTED FOR THE ORWELL PRIZE 2015 'A terrific portrait of Delhi right now' - SALMAN RUSHDIE 'An astonishing tour de force by a major writer at the peak of his powers' - WILLIAM DALRYMPLE It is said of Indian cities that Calcutta, the former British capital, owned the nineteenth century, Bombay, centre of films and corporations, possessed the twentieth, while Delhi, seat of politics, has the twenty-first. The boom following the opening up of India's economy in the early 1990s plunged its capital city into a tumult of destruction and creation: slums and markets were bulldozed or burnt down, and shopping malls and apartment blocks erupted from the ruins - or upon agricultural land taken over in the interests of business and modernization. Immense fortunes were made, and in the glassy stores lining the new highways, customers paid for global luxury with bags of cash. Meanwhile, hundreds of thousands of people from the rural hinterland streamed into the newly formed 'National Capital Region' looking for work, which they often found constructing, cleaning or guarding the homes of the increasingly affluent middle class. The transformation of the city was stern, abrupt and unequal, and it gave rise to new and bewildering feelings. Delhi brimmed with ambition and rage. Bizarre crimes stole the headlines. In his first work of non-fiction, Rana Dasgupta shows us this new Delhi through the eyes of its people. With the lyricism and empathy of a novelist, he takes us through a series of encounters - with billionaires and bureaucrats, drug dealers and metal traders, slum dwellers and psychoanalysts - which plunge us into the city's intoxicating, and sometimes terrifying, story of capitalist transformation.
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Constitution to remove curbs on prime ministerial power. Amnesty International estimated that 140,000 people were imprisoned without trial and, in many cases, tortured, during the twenty months of the Emergency. The Emergency traumatised universities, many of which were vocal in their opposition; it also gave great moral standing to the Sikh parties and radical Hindu groups, many of which maintained principled criticism in the face of Indira Gandhi’s onslaught. For some, the Emergency did not.
Boundaries that had hemmed in their childhoods – to an extent, in fact, that unnerved many of the Americans and Europeans who subsequently found much of their lives administered from the other side of the world. These entrepreneurs were intelligent iconoclasts who believed in technology and corporations, and hoped to use the power thereof to overturn nearly everything of the India that had existed before 1991. And yet they were Indian, and when they looked at the world of American business they.
Could expand. We got the opportunity to acquire a metal components company, one of Suzuki’s joint ventures. You need to know that when Suzuki came into India, there was no supply chain and they had to develop it for themselves.To develop a supply chain they had to motivate people. To motivate people they did joint ventures. One of the joint ventures was my dad’s. And this company we acquired, which made fuel tanks, exhaust systems, suspension, axles, was another. That acquisition expanded our.
Devastating war fought in that very place, Kurukshetra, between two branches of a single family; the contemporary resonances must have been clear to all. Over time the greatest number of these refugees settled in Delhi. It was easier to force a way into Delhi than anywhere else: as the capital of the new nation, Delhi displayed the greatest resolve in providing shelter, welfare and business loans to Partition refugees; as a recent city built in the middle of great stretches of open land, it also.
Production of the new, which could only happen through perennial destruction. This is what Dostoevsky was referring to when he observed, in London in 1862,“that apparent disorder that is in actuality the highest degree of bourgeois order”.31 The business family was a structure that was designed to ride undismayed through the storm of disorder, and to profit from it. But the risks were high. One of the reasons that legend speaks so exuberantly of the perfect warrior is that he – or she – is an.