Lawlessness, corruption, poverty and pollution: the city where we’re all headed

Rana Dasgupta, who was born and brought up in Britain, moved to Delhi at the end of 2000, principally to pursue a love affair and to write his first novel. He soon found himself mixing in bohemian circles, spending his evenings in ‘small, bare and, in those days, cheap’ apartments, talking with ‘artists and intellectuals’. These are not the people, nor is this the life or the city that he describes in Capital. The book’s title is in fact a pun, since its principal subject is money: how it is acquired, how it is spent and what it has done to Delhi and its citizens.

When India gained independence it was decided that the state needed to exercise ‘a considerable measure of intervention and control’ if this vast new country was to thrive and benefit all its people. A closed and centrally planned economy more or less persisted until 1991 when the then finance minister (now Prime Minister) Manmohan Singh introduced ‘liberalisation’, opening up the country to global markets.