delhi. im rausch des geldes

by Rana Dasgupta

In Capital, Commonwealth Prize-winning author Rana Dasgupta examines one of the great trends of our the expansion of the global elite. Capital is an intimate portrait of the city of Delhi which bears witness to the extraordinary transmogrification of India's capital. But it also offers a glimpse of what capitalism will become in the coming, post-Western world. The story of Delhi is a parable for where we are all headed. The boom following the opening up of India's economy plunged Delhi into a tumult of destruction and 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 nestled among 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. Violent crimes stole the headlines. In the style of V. S. Naipaul's now classic personal journeys, Dasgupta shows us this city through the eyes of its people. With the lyricism and empathy of a novelist, Dasgupta takes us through a series of encounters - with billionaires and bureaucrats, drug dealers and metal traders, slum dwellers and psychoanalysts - which plunge us into Delhi's intoxicating, and sometimes terrifying, story of capitalist transformation. Together these people comprise a generation on the cusp, like that of Gilded Age New who they are, and what they want, says a tremendous amount about what the world will look like in the rest of the twenty-first century. Interweaving over a century of history with his personal journey, Dasgupta presents us with the first literary portrait of one of the twenty-first century's fastest-growing megalopolises - a dark and uncanny portrait that gives us insights, too, as to the nature of our own - everyone's - shared, global future.

Genres: India, Nonfiction, History, Economics, Travel, Asia, Reportage

Paperback

First published May 15, 2014

About the author

Rana Dasgupta is a British-Indian writer. He grew up in Cambridge, England and studied at Balliol College, Oxford, the Conservatoire Darius Milhaud in Aix-en-Provence, and the University of Wisconsin–Madison. He lives in Delhi, India.

His first novel, Tokyo Cancelled (2005), was an examination of the forces and experiences of globalization. Billed as a modern-day Canterbury Tales, thirteen passengers stuck overnight in an airport tell thirteen stories from different cities in the world, stories that resemble contemporary fairytales, mythic and surreal. The tales add up to a broad exploration of 21st century forms of life, which includes billionaires, film stars, migrant labourers, illegal immigrants and sailors. [1] Tokyo Cancelled was shortlisted for the 2005 John Llewellyn Rhys Prize.

Dasgupta's second novel, Solo (2009) is an epic tale of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries told from the perspective of a one hundred-year old Bulgarian man. Having achieved little in his twentieth-century life, he settles into a long and prophetic daydream of the twenty-first century, where all the ideological experiments of the old century are over, and a collection of startling characters - demons and angels - live a life beyond utopia.

Reviews

[Caroline · Rating 5 out of 5]

Just a few days ago, Narendra Modi banned the two largest currency notes in India - 500 and 1,000 rupees, in an effort to catch those who are corrupt, or practising tax avoidance. A brief synopsis of the situation can be found in The New York Times:

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/15/wor...

But if you want to learn the full story about the heavy burden of corruption that beleaguers Indian society, then this is the book for you. You need to gird your loins and stiffen your resolve, because this is not an easy read. Dasgupta interviews a series of people, interspersed with descriptions of Indian history, politics, and notorious episodes of corruption - like the organising of the Commonwealth Games in Delhi in 2010. Most of the people he interviews are ridiculously wealthy - and immoral, corrupt and grasping, (warning - their attitudes and behaviours give one serious indigestion.) A couple of the people he interviews however are highly principled and fighting for the rights of the poor, whose lives have been horrendously disrupted by corrupt business practices.

Dasgupta is a novelist, and he writes with much power. This is his first work of non-fiction, and the book is about Delhi, the capital of India, where he now lives. It is an ode to stinking and corrupt capitalism at its very worst, and carries warnings that all of us will recognise, wherever we live. I think reasonably regulated capitalism is a good thing, but this is a story of things going very wrong. Highly recommended.

I will end with two great big chunks of information that are totally for my own interest, mostly taken directly from the book.

In 1991 Manmohan Singh, India's new finance minister announced that India would now embrace the principles of open markets and free enterprise. Before that there was a closed-economy orthodoxy, introduced by Jawaharlal Nehru. Nehru felt that Britain's system of free capitalism had pauperised India, whose per capita income had not increased between 1757 and 1947. This was due to the enormous drain on India's wealth during the British era.

Nehru was inspired by the Bolshevik revolution, and argued strongly for a centrally planned economy. He visited the USSR in 1927, on the 10th anniversary of the revolution, and was filled with excitement.

He also made India a democracy. The constitution granted universal sufferage to adult citizens, despite the fact that only 12% of them could read, plus he guaranteed freedom of the press. These things paid off, and are an extraordinary legacy to India's founding politicians.

Nehru instigated a series of Five-year Plans which would harness the nation's resources into coordinated forward thrusts. Later these plans were formalized by Prasanta Chandra Mahalanobis.

1) Strategic industries were the exclusive preserve of the state eg
oil
gas
atomic energy
defence
aircraft
iron
steel
electricity generation and transmission
heavy electricals
telecommunications
coal
strategic minerals.

2) there would be a second category where both state and private enterprises could operate.
chemicals
pharmaceuticals
fertilizers
pulp and paper
road transport.

3) The remaining industries - such as consumer goods - were open to private companies. Private enterprise was subject to intense controls however: specific government licenses were needed to
*introduce new products
*set up a new plant
*fire workers
*Make major investments.

Those big business houses that escaped nationalization were kept under the watchful eye of the Congress Party; in return for their docility they were given cosy access to commercial licenses, which kept competition away and ensured high profits even when, as was often the case, their actual products were of terrrible quality.

Nehru set up several high-level research institutions whith the help of the theoretical physicist Homi Bhabha.
*The Tata Institute of Fundamental Research
*The Atomic Energy Establishment
* The Indian Istitute of Technology
*The Indian Institute of Management

These institutions continued to play a critical role into our own century - turning out many of the men and women responsible not only for India's technology boom, but indeed, because many of them ended up in Silicon Valley - for America's too.

By Nuhru's death in 1964, and the end of the third Five-year Plan, the promise of the early years was looking remote. Nehru left behind a thwarted economy, whose resuscitation was the subject of furious debates for nearly three decades thereafter. Part of the reason these debates were so drawn out, however, was that Nehru's conception of India continued to enjoy an almost theological prestige, even as the economic system on which it was based withered.

In the years following Nehru's death, the wider world became, even for the educated and affluent, even more remote and prohibited. During the 1970s and 80s for instance, foreign travel by private citizens, while technically allowed, was difficult even for the few who could afford an air ticket, because of severe restrictions placed on currency exchange. An international phone call had to be booked a day in advance. Very few foreign companies could invest in Indian firms or set up Indian operations of their own, and imports of foreign products were largely banned.... So perhaps it may be understood from all of this why India could not contemplate the dismantling of its state controls and embrace of global capital until there was simply no other choice - even though the Indian economy was conspicuously dysfunctional for decades... The idea was simply too blasphemous. And yet, by July 1991, the prevailing system was in tatters and there was indeed no other choice.

Since then, the Indian economy has grown by as much as 10% per annum, overtaking the economies of Canada and Russia, to join the ten largest economies in the world...


------------------------------

Dasgupta argues that the successful in Delhi "owed much of their prosperity to these others...to the fact that they were situated in the middle of an ocean of poverty."

"Sweeping away from Delhi's south-eastern edge was the vast swathe of Uttar Pradesh and Bihar, where 300 million people earned an average of $500 per year. Not only were they very poor, the were also politically weak, and their lives were getting worse. They constituted therefore a cheap and near-infinite resource for the labour-intensive industries - such as construction, mining and manufacturing - that made Delhi wealthy."

He talks about a "corporate occupation of the countryside which pitted big money against poor agricultural and tribal communities, turning rural India into a turbulent and volatile battleground. Expanding business needed land, and most of India's land was in the hands of small farmers, whose legal ownership of it had been well secured during the Nehru years." He says this land could not be acquired legally "So the post-liberalisation period was witness to various forms of seizure involving millions of hectares of rural land. Sometimes this was achieved by so-called land mafias...who got farmers off their land with gang violence, or who used connections in the political establishment not only to arbitrarily re-allocate land but also to enforce the order with state resources- such as the police. But often the land grab was enacted by the state according to the terms of the Land Acquisition Act of 1894, an instrument introduced by the British empire to legalise the expropriation of lands from their historical owners to the colonial power - and indeed the rampage of Indian elites in their own country bore a significant resemblance to that of nineteenth-century European imperialists in other countries. Land was repossessed under an authoritarian law, little or no compensation was given to the people who previously made their living from it, and it was sold on, often at ten times the price, to corporations."

"At on point there were hundreds of protest across the country over land appropriation.. Most distressingly for the political establishment, an armed Maoist rebellion swept the country's most devastated rural regions, and in many places usurped all state control.... Prime minister Manmohan Singh declare in 2006 that they represented the 'single biggest security challenge ever faced by our country'...which was something of a shock to the urban elites."

"But even those rural communities who managed to escape such land battles found that it was increasingly difficult to survive doing what they had previously done..... This was partly because of altered ecological conditions, particularly as regarded water. The expanding cities found themselves in a greater and greater water deficit, and had to pull it in from further and further afield, drying out villages and agriculture to a radius of hundreds of kilometres."

Other farms were affected by the high-intensity farming introduced in the 1960s - the 'Green Revolution' - had by that time exhausted their land and they were obliged to explore the possibility of new crops and chemical supplements. At the same time, the arrival of global corporations looking to India's farmers to supply raw materials for processed foods presented them with new revenue... Many farmers therefore opted to stop growing food and to pursue higher returns by growing cash crops such as sugar cane, coffee, cotton, spices or flowers. But this left a financially vulnerable group highly exposed to market fluctuations ...."

In other instances, due to international trade agreements, farmers were tied to buying seed, fertiliser and pesticide products from global biotech corporations, and the seed was often sterile, so had to be purchased every year. "In an environmental context that was already becoming more stern, many farmers exhausted their land with the new chemicals, and entered an impossible spiral of debt."

"Together, all these things were fatal. In the first decade of the twenty-first century, some 15,000 Indian farmers committed suicide every year."

As a result of this rural crisis "large tides of refugees departed for the cities"

"Delhi's affluent households were hungry for servants. The fact that it was so easy to purchase cheap labour, in fact, was essential to urban middle-class identity. Even modestly off families often employed a chauffeur, while a maid to come early in the morning and clean the floors of the previous day's dust was de-rigueur....And yet their relationships with their domestic servant were frequently, and bizarrely, resentful." They showed little sympathy for the trauma's that sometimes struck the fragile lives of their employees.

"The middle classes were fond of seeing themselves as under-appreciated benefactors and their image of the poor was not as a productive engine but as a pack of parasites living off their own intelligence and hard work. it was they, the middle classes, who contributed real value to the economy..... India's boom belonged to the middle classes: it was their moment, and they would fight furiously for it. In a country where the mean income was $1,400 per year, the slightest move to average out incomes would be catastrophic for the few who earned, say, $60,000 per year. So the 90 per cent were excommunicated from the middle-class project of India's rise, and their claims on better incomes and better lives pronounced illegitimate."

"And yet it goes without saying that the poor were instrumental to the new accumulation of middle-class wealth. The disaster of the Indian countryside unleashed not only a handy supply of domestic servants; it also generated a vast supply of lab our for construction firms and factory owners..... Employers never had to worry about where the next workers would come from. They could pay almost nothing, and demand pretty much any level of toil. It was common for factory workers to work sixteen hours a day; seven days a week, thirty days a month. Most were not paid the minimum wage of $4 per day, and almost none were granted pensions or insurance. The fact that Indian factories were now producing for consumers all over the world added to the intensity of workers' lives but made almost no difference to their salaries."

-----------------------------------

If you would prefer a more uplifting read about Delhi, William Dalrymple's book City of Djinns is equally brilliant, but it is funny, endearing and quirky, and shows Delhi in a much kinder light.

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1...

[Emiliya Bozhilova · Rating 4 out of 5]

Какъв е успешният делхиец?



1️⃣ Мъж - жената стои вкъщи, слуша свекървата, гледа децата, масажира краката на мъжа, не го разпитва и говори и изобщо, все едно я няма - позволено ѝ е само да ходи на шипинг за свръхлуксозни джунджурии;

2️⃣ Богат барон-разбойник/ мародер, всъщност де факто скрит милиардер - но нито една рупия не е отчетена пред данъчните (които са некомпетентни и корумпирани). Бизнесите му са свързани с държавни поръчки, монополи и недвижими имоти. И при двете има здрави връзки в полицията, сред политиците и сред институциите. Което не се урежда с пари, се урежда с много пари. Като да изгониш на улицата няколко стотин хиляди души, да им отнемеш земите без пари с полицейски рекет, да ги ползваш за строителни работници без нито една предпазна мярка като каска например (защото ще се разглезят), да ти работят до откат без договор и почти без заплата (не са я заслужили, а и ще се разглезят);

3️⃣ Задръстен до носа и горд с традиционните си индийски ценности - живее със семейството си до 90 годишна възраст, бракът е винаги уговорен и никога извън кастата, децата отрано се научават да слушат, всичко с намек за “избор” или “свобода” е дегенератско изказване на гнилия либерализъм и на трижди гнилия колониален запад;

4️⃣ Купува на едро земи в Африка и ползва тамошна секретна военна база, за да вкара самолет с роднини за сватба и така да си спести имиграционните формалности.

Изброяването би могло да продължи още доста, но и това дава представа за материала от интервютата с различни представители на богатата средна делхийска класа в книгата. “Средна” тя е по индийските стандарти, не по нашите - в Индия има мизерстващи, адски и невъобразимо богати и малко по-малко богати. Героите на Дасгупта са от последната прослойка.

Да се очертае портрет на огромен и пукащ се по шевовете от конфликти и корупция мегаполис като Делхи е амбициозна задача, и Дасгупта подхожда с необходимото уважение и опит за дълбочина.

Иронията, произтичаща директно от щастливите или нещастни “размишления” на “героите” е една от най-силните страни на книгата. Дасгупта дава директно думата именно на “елита”. Друга силна страна са любопитните факти покрай свръхлюбопитни социално-обществени феномени и исторически последствия. Дасгупта е сладкодумен и достатъчно информиран. Също така е изпълнен с негодувание пред бездните от несправедливост и разялата всички брънки на обществото корупция (затова и индийско общество де факто не съществува, на негово място властва кастовото, клановото и семейното обединение). Корупцията е на практика отделен герой, а лицата ѝ са почти толкова, колкото и тези на висшите индуистки божества!

Това, което обаче авторът не е, е “достатъчно обективен”. Коренът на цялото зло за Дасгупта е … глобализацията в ново време и британският колониализъм - в старо. Изобщо - капитализмът… Вероятно поради собствения си произход и избор на местожителство Дасгупта не е в състояние да види нито един недостатък в делхийската и индийската стара култура (и на места сам се вкарва в класическото клише “по-голям католик и от папата”). Женомразството за него е оправдано, защото… било запазване на традициите пред зловредното английско влияние! Хич не ги оправдавам англичаните, но да се оправдава универсално и наднационално зло под дегизировката на “патриотизъм” е не по-малко ужасяващо лицемерие и самозаблуда. Изобщо, пожелателното мислене и розовите очила плюс синдромът за невинност здраво да оплели интелигентен иначе автор в мрежите си. Дасгупта е поредният търсач на чудовището, наречено “уникален национално и културно обусловен морал”. А без честно признание на истинските причини и виновници за разломите зовът му за социална справедливост винаги ще е напразен и леко лицемерен.

Разходката из богаташките квартали обаче е страшно интересна (тук броя и гетото, защото интервюто там е с представителка на висша каста, което е разбираемо - контакти с низшите Дасгупта просто няма). Индия ще има все по-усилващо се глобално влияние и разбирането за раздиращите я вътрешни процеси, които я лашкат между космически технологии и деградираща мизерия и хищничество, ще е все по-ключово в този глобализиран свят. Който съвсем не е светло и справедливо място (както и самият капитализъм в куп свои разновидности не е върхът на бора!). Но такова не е и розовата фалшива носталгия по никога несъществувало идеализирано минало. Двете се използват ловко от демагозите на деня, и ценен е именно изборът да не им се хващаме (стига да сме на онова ниво в пирамидата на Маслоу, на което да можем да си го позволим, разбира се).

3,5⭐️

——
П.П. Поредно интригуващо и качествено поднесено и преведено заглавие в поредицата “Памет” на Жанет-45.

[Sairam Krishnan · Rating 4 out of 5]

I left Delhi to come back home to the south in February last year, at which time Rana Dasgupta’s Capital was the ‘in-book’. It tells you something about Delhi that there’s such a thing as an 'in-book', but that’s not the point; in those days, everyone with even mild literary inclinations was talking about it, either reading it and talking about not reading it. I had been looking forward to it since Dasgupta’s excellent long-ago Granta essay which foretold the tome. Even William Dalrymple, whose City of Djinns I still consider THE Delhi book, had called it the next great book on the city.



And then it started, the entire gamut of reviews and that a long awaited book like this receives, and I was immediately submerged in them. I read a few of them, and found that the book divided opinion with severity. It was either great or very bad, and there weren’t a lot of in-betweens. I was influenced by a well argued, particularly scathing review and decided not to read it until I was sure it was worth my time.

That was a mistake.

Because when I did get around to reading Capital this year, I understood why it is a brilliant book and why it was attacked in the way that it was, and why it didn’t win all the acclaim it should have. This was arguably not just because of the issues it raises, which discomfitures the city’s elite and their self image, but because this deep an analysis of a city and its people, broken and lost as they both are, is something few writers would endeavour to approach in this way, let alone do justice to; Dasgupta is looking at Delhi differently, he wants the reader to as well - not something all critics will be happy with.

Capital is a disturbing book. From the beginning, this point is made clear to us, that this is not going to be easy to read. Delhi is not an easy city to live in, and the forces that sustain and propel it are not easily distinguished or explained. This means that there will be a lot of conjecture, the imagination will have to take a few leaps. Only then can we even partially come to terms with what the India's capital has evolved into. The author stresses that this process hasn’t ended; the seemingly bottomless energy of this constantly changing city is what guides the narrative. Remember, Dasgupta tells us as we read, this capital of yours is alive.

The book starts with an introduction of how trade works in this city. And slowly the narrator’s vision takes us higher up; this isn’t the looking up from the ground approach of Barbara Ehrenreich’s reportage, or the view from the grime of Old Delhi that Aman Sethi conjures up in A Free Man. Dasgupta sees Delhi from up on high, as he comments on the forces that shaped the city and continue to do so.



Inevitably, the author starts with liberalisation and writes a beautiful chapter on the artists of Delhi’s early 90s, the bohemians who first felt the change underfoot and tried to understand it with their art. And then abruptly, he contrasts that time with the seemingly ideal-less present, achieving an effect that he uses repeatedly in the book. This contrast might be rather in-your-face set piece, but it is necessary. Delhi can never be understood without going back to its past.



Rana Dasgupta talks to Delhi’s nouveau rich, all endlessly and distressingly drawn from a similar set of people and circumstances - the post partition frenzy of finding financial security by any means possible, a mood that has never left this city, and continues still, more than anything else, to define it. Delhi’s wealth is not independent of location, Dasgupta reminds us again and again. Delhi’s rich are rich precisely because they find (and in a lot of cases, found) themselves in a unique setting of time and place, the likes of which are exceedingly rare; and they took advantage of it. Of course, this isn’t to generalise. A lot of people built perfectly honourable, institutions, establishments and businesses in this melee. But Dasgupta isn’t talking about them. He’s talking about the ones who recognised the opportunity for what it was - a gold rush, and set about mining it. Dasgupta posits that, knowing where they came from, this wasn’t surprising or even unnatural. 



Except that Delhi forgot when to stop. Crony capitalism that feeds on the abundant political connections available, and inflated real estate, is where Delhi’s money comes from, and neither of these avenues is for the faint of heart. For Delhi’s elite though, the ability and the resolve to wade through this muck comes naturally.

Dasgupta’s sentences are sometimes magnificent, sometimes brutal and edgy but seldom inane. His eyes are that of a novelist’s, looking at a landscape at large but resting on the innocuous and the mundane, before joining the two dots together and making an observation that astounds and delights at the same time. Though there are instances in which his arguments seem overstretched, at no point is his tone anywhere near unbelievable. As I mentioned, Delhi is not an easy place to understand. A leap of faith is necessary.

In the end, as even Dalrymple did, Dasgupta returns to ancient Delhi, and writes a moving elegy to the city's threatened and rapidly fading water sources, the natural resource that first made the city possible. In perhaps the only tone of reassurance, however morbid, that he offers us in the whole book, the author talks of the almost eternal perpetuity of the old Mughal capital. The city we now call Delhi is the most modern, though perhaps the most lawless, incarnation of the place that has seen so much and endured, across centuries, kingdoms, sultanates and governments. And it will outlive us too, and what we have made out of it. There will come a time in Delhi when this will be the past too, and the river which gave it birth will still flow on, winding its way through the plains of a great, ancient civilisation.

Perhaps justice will yet be done. 


[Khush · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book is about Delhi post-1990s. Rana Dasgupta successfully records the transition of Delhi from a sleeping monster to a raging one. The city's landscape has changed in unprecedented ways; new jobs, multinational companies, escalation in prices of real estate. Apparently, this has also impacted its people in different ways.

So this book tells the story of Delhi and people who live in it. He meets some of Delhi's ultra-rich and talks to them about their ambitions and plans for the future, what is it that moves these rich men to become richer, to work harder and so forth. Some of these stories give a glimpse of what is going on underneath Delhi's so-called material success. In these stories, one can see how culture, religion and global capital intersect and produce newer forms of being; some of this is, of course, good and some is undoubtedly challenging. For instance, while the city is developing in all directions, its middle and upper middle classes are growing richer they show complete disregard toward the poor. In some queer way, in a profit-driven society, almost every body, irrespective of where one is in the social hierarchy, suffers the brunt of it.

Among some of the better stories, I particularly liked the one about the fashion designer Manish Arora. He grew up in an ordinary middle-class household, and unlike many of his generation he took an unusual path and became an internationally renowned fashion designer. Manish is openly gay. Likewise, there are stories of women who came out in a big way and joined all sort of professions, which, until now, are the stronghold of men. There is one exemplary story of a young girl from a very ordinary background who works full-time for the rights of slum-dwellers. Usually, it is the privileged women who go in their big cars to help the poor.

There are also some interesting explanations about why Delhities behave in the way they do. For instance, why Delhi's Punjabis, a wealthy community, are so boisterous, loud and go beyond their pockets when it comes to celebrations of all kind. Rana claims that this is their way of dealing with the trauma of partition; they still carry within them that pain, and their excessive focus on celebration, partying is a way to alleviate the pain. In another context, Rana Dasgupta wonders at how come people are so oblivious to the state and have almost zero level faith in it abilities to protect them. Even a casual look at Delhi's streets, this is also true of other major Indian cities, one sees that people are quite oblivious to the miseries of those living o streets. The author believes that this is because of the Indian caste system. People belong to their caste first; it is caste that provides them a safety net and people drive their sense of who they are through caste.

The author only moved to India in recent years. In his manner of speech and behaviour, he comes across much more like a Brit than an Indian. In parts, his explanations of people and their habits reeks of biases and prejudices. For instance, his attitude toward Delhi's elite is quite sympathetic. They are somehow above his critique as if by critiquing them he will harm himself.

My favourite chapter in the book is the last one on water-systems in Delhi. This is one of the most crucial chapters in the book. Indian urban centres will have huge problems on water front. Here we see how wrong policies, greed can lead to a disaster of sorts. In the past, the water was used and stored in a way that suited to its geography. In this chapter, it is explained in a great detail how it worked. With the dawn of pipelines and several decades later the eruption of industrial units around Delhi, we have effectively choked its waters; its rivers have been tamed into drains– toxic ones. This aspect of Delhi is, perhaps for other India urban centers too, scary because no one is paying attention as if Delhi can do without water– as if coco cola will fulfill Delhi's water deficit.

Of course as a reader one can easily explicate oneself because Delhi's problem are after all only Delhi's problems. This is only partly true. If one just scratches a bit, one sees how one is playing a part.

[Karolina · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5, ale wpisuję 3 gwiazdki, bo mimo wielu ciekawych historii i idei, konstrukcja jest chaotyczna i gubiłam się między wątkami (i bohaterami) wielokrotnie. No i kto wymyślił polski tytuł? Oryginał to "Capital: The Eruption of Delhi", czasami zapisywany też jako "Capital: A Portrait Of Delhi In The Twenty-First Century".

[readerswords · Rating 3 out of 5]

A disappointing work by an outsider trying to understand one of the major cities of the world through the eyes of its rich, if not its richest. The work is long, verbose and offers little that is not already known to most.

This is not to say that there are no occasional flashes of insight and interest. For example, in the middle of the book where the author has a long conversation with a social worker and residents of a slum within the city and in the last chapter where he beautifully describes the river Yamuna which flows across the city.

To the non- Indian reader, the book provides a dystopian view of one of the emerging centres of world capitalism, almost as a reassurance of the West's continued dominance.

The most fundamental flaw of the book is that it seeks to understand how the city's rich imagine their city. The rich do not lack the means to convert their imaginations into reality, whether these be opulent malls or gated communities. It is the poor and the dispossessed whose imaginations need words to be described.

[E.T. · Rating 4 out of 5]

4.5/5 This is one of the best travelogues I have read - it sometimes read like literary fiction with beautiful poetic passages, there were great observations and insights and the sheer variety of ppl (20+) who narrated their stories mostly in their own words. The author perfectly understood where and how much commentary was needed. And the commentary was not partisan, it was not filled with bitter anger nor was it filled with sly flowery propaganda of any sort.
This book had been on my to-read list for sometime and I used to think - "How can u write a book on a single city spanning 450+ pages ?" Afterall, I have read travelogues of 200-300 pages spanning entire India and sometimes even entire continents ! But, to the author's credit the book rarely felt repetitive and the stories provide an exhaustive , complete picture of 21st century Delhi from bureaucrats, slum-dwellers, activists, businessmen, super-rich crony capitalists, housewives etc. You get a great sense of how Delhi functions. And as a bonus, he has also covered its history with chapters on 1857, 1911, 1947 and the anti-Sikh pogroms in 1984. And I dont remember if I have highlighted more times or posted more status updates for a book.
Recommended reading !

[Sunjay · Rating 5 out of 5]

It is an unfortunate reminder of how jaded Indian society is when you see all the reviews below panning this book as "stuff we've heard before". Seriously? Is everyone so resigned to living in a gangster state that the lucid (and lurid) anecdotes in this compendium no longer make people tremble with rage and indignation? Have we all just decided to meekly allow ignorant fools with no shame to take over Delhi and rule it with all the wisdom of a poorly toilet trained 3 year old, crapping wherever they wish?

Sure, there is nothing in this book that any well read student of contemporary India does not know about. It's the prose and the theoretical yarn that Dasgupta weaves that makes it truly compelling. His ability to thread all the multifaceted symptoms of the ill city together into a comprehensive diagnosis is what is worth reading. I'm not sure I agree 100% with his analysis, but that is a moot point, as I found his argument enchanting and thought provoking.

[Mosco · Rating 4 out of 5]

"Come mi ha detto una volta la proprietaria – curiosamente autocritica – di una fabbrica tessile, riflettendo sul sistema in cui giocava un ruolo cruciale:C’è stato un tempo in cui potevi essere un capitalista con una tua personalità. Potevi decidere secondo quale filosofia vivere. Adesso non conta se sei una ‘bella’ persona. È del tutto irrilevante. Viviamo in un’epoca in cui sappiamo tutti che quel che facciamo è disgustoso, eppure continuiamo a farlo. Il sistema di cui facciamo parte è alimentato dalla disperazione. E ogni sistema che richieda simili livelli di disperazione produrrà sempre più disordini, e l’unico modo per tenerli sotto controllo sarà un aumento della militarizzazione su scala mondiale."

[Umesh Kesavan · Rating 4 out of 5]

Rana weaves a web of exquisite prose to study what capitalism has done to Delhi -a city which had previously been traumatized by other catastrophic historical forces (like imperialism and partition). The author alternates between personal interactions with a wide range of faces (from a wife-beating billionaire to a young activist working in the slums) and deep thoughts on what the future of the Global City will be. He paints a bleak future for the city and we can only seek solace in the fact that out of trauma, such meaningful works are written.

[Христо Блажев · Rating 5 out of 5]

Капитал, Делхи, Индия – бъдещето в сегашно време: https://knigolandia.info/kapital/

„Капитал“ е между- и многожанрова творба, която рисува епично платно в две основни посоки – миналото и настоящето, както и кръстопътя сред „големия кипеж на разрушение и съзидание… яростното разрушаване на стария „хардуер“ в надпреварата за глобализация“ – тогава, когато домовете на стотици хиляди бедняци са разчистени брутално, за да се освободи място за нови търговски центрове и безумно скъпи жилищни комплекси. Столицата на най-многолюдната държава на планетата няма как да не е град на контрасти, на крайности, на постоянна промяна – точно нея иска да възпее едновременно с възхита и негодувание Дасгупта, като ни показва и нейната смайваща многоликост през десетилетията и дори вековете назад. Още в началото той пише: „няма друг индийски мегаполис, в който градският елит да се наслаждава на такова пасторално спокойствие – това е запазена марка на столицата. … Делхийският богаташ предпочита, когато се събуди сутрин, пред погледа му да се простират пусти, старателно подстригани морави чак до увенчаните с бодлива тел зидове“, и допълва, че „затворените комплекси, в които богатите търсят убежище от обществото, са поредното екстравагантно проявление на всеобщия стремеж към изолация“, отчасти и защото така „жителите са защитени от променливите настроения в страната.“ Същевременно това е град, в който тротоарите просто свършват в нищото, на пешеходеца му се налага „да притичва като обезумял през осем ленти автомобили“, да катери купчини боклук дори, и всеки бързо стига до решението, че му е нужен автомобил – и то колкото се може по-скъп, защото „инвестицията в превозно средство носи очевидни дивиденти.“

ИК Жанет 45
https://knigolandia.info/kapital/

[Tarun · Rating 4 out of 5]

This one made me deeply uncomfortable. I was born and raised in Delhi but this book actually put into words a lot of what I've seen or experienced myself. Rana Dasgupta has written a disturbing but pretty incisive account of his 16 years in this city.
Ugly, neoliberal-dystopian hellscape.

[Sve · Rating 4 out of 5]

I started reading Capital after coming back from my last visit to Delhi.
It is great to learn more about the place where I dreamed of living in and actually lived close by for a while.
The author conducts a variety of interviews with people that, together with historical notes, help shape the contemporary face of India's capital.
I would be interested to read a 'sequel' or an updated version, since 9 years have passed since 'Capital' was published and a lot can change in such a period, especially in a country like India

[Tanya Sen · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a searing read. Dasgupta puts together a patchwork of intricate stories of various inhabitants of Delhi, applying at once the keen eye of a reporter, the insight of a psychologist, the lyricism of a poet.

We hear the perspectives of overt Bentley-driving, farmhouse-hopping billionaires as well as the 'shadow' billionaires that are refused car loans (because of how little income they actually declare)... of the patients-turned-victims of Delhi's corporate hospitals (whose doctors are incentivised by the revenue they bring in)... of newly 'liberated' women who may be empowered at their workplace but suffer humiliation in their own homes... of Delhi's itinerant slum dwellers whose townships are constantly razed to the ground to make room for new developments...of people who get rich quick by fitting themselves somewhere into the vast framework of black money and bribery that underpins the whole city... and more. The snapshots are vivid, detailed and disturbing and are set within context of historical stories (such as that of Indira Gandhi's centralisation of power, to which the author alludes most of the ingrained corruption in India today) as well as as modern ones (such as that of the 2010 Commonwealth Games, an illustration of the extent to which the needs of the poor were swept aside in the name of everything modern, as well as the scale of corruption in the city).

The author claims several times to have a complicated love-hate relationship with the city and even the last line turns quite suddenly positive ("Delhi...is one of the most beautiful places on earth"). These positive claims are the only ones that feel somewhat jarring and out of place because they appear to have so little basis within a picture that varies from depressing to downright frightening. The book is quite long and paints maybe an extreme picture, but I found it to be a worthwhile read.

[Ajita Shukla · Rating 3 out of 5]

Written from the point of view of a foreigner, this book attempts to outline the character of Delhi - the various tragedies, developments and incidents that have made it what it is today. The author talks about the Mughal period, British period, 1947 partition, post-partition, IT boom, 1970 Sikh riots, patriarchy, real-estate and housing, water crisis - trying to make the reader understand how different leaders and governments have exploited various aspects of the city. For someone who has lived here for 24 years now but has remained ignorant of its past, this was an eye-opener: it's amazing to know how much this city has endured!

I really enjoyed the Delhi Sultanate chapters, so much so that I decided to visit some of the monuments that I had never cared about before. I also see myself developing a newfound interest in Urdu, thanks to a chapter dedicated to it.

However, I felt that some paragraphs in this book are quite verbose, boring and unnecessary. The author's analysis make chapters too long, and I felt lost between paragraphs, sometimes re-reading or entirely skipping some of them. I feel I would have enjoyed the book much more and finished it much earlier, had it been shorter.

Nonetheless, it was a great read, and I would recommend it to anyone trying to understand not just this beautiful city, but the post-partition India as well.

[Sukanto · Rating 3 out of 5]

To cut the long story short, this book could have easily done with a hundred pages less. There's a lot of historical gleaning eventually ending up as rambling. While it's good to see how Rana Dasgupta has tried to form the picture of something going through systemic decay, repeating that in almost every chapter with a curious tone of whining doesn't do much justice to the reader. Capital is surely a very good attempt at accounting the tale of Delhi as it is and were, but perhaps needed a tighter narration to make it a better read.

[Noor Anand · Rating 2 out of 5]

I have to state at the outset, this is a well written, and well researched book. The interviews with people from different strata of society are very engaging. However, where this book loses majorly is on its over-analysis. Preachy and quite boring in parts, it lost my attention many a time. However for its interesting and insightful glimpse into the capital of our vast and complex country- India, its worth a read.

[Dpdwyer · Rating 4 out of 5]

Delhi is a monstrous, dysfunctional society wreaking havoc in North India. “Corporate” hospitals pay their doctors a percentage of the costs of tests and medications ordered. When the patient runs out of money---it’s all done for cash---he is sent home. Slum dwellers are evicted without warning and go about building new communities brick by brick until the next eviction. And so on. Dasgupta is a wonderful writer, and his interviews with Delhi dwellers are the best parts of the book. His focus is more on the capitalist, political, and criminal classes than on the poor. I recommend reading it with Aman Sethi’s A Free Man, which describes the lives of the homeless poor. Sample quotes from Capital:

“Horns blare continually, for the traffic is not a stream that carries you with it, but a jungle through which you hack. People drive as if everyone is against them, and in fact it’s true: any space or opportunity they do not seize with all the speed and bulk of their vehicle is immediately usurped by someone else. You can see it here, at the red light, where everyone is looking around to make sure no one else is scheming to take their advantage away. Some cars out front, of course, simply make a dash across the junction, through the contrary traffic---those who wish to assert their freedom from plebeian constraints like traffic lights.”

“The road I drive on now, for instance, has recently been widened: rows of buildings on either side have had their fronts ripped off in the process, and for months this stretch has looked like a war zone. This impression is all the stronger for the fact that life does not stop in the severed rooms, as everyone driving up against them can see. Even in the upper levels, where it would be possible to fall off the floors’ hacked edge to certain death, lights are on, desks stand against the walls and clerks cover their ears against traffic to hear telephone conversations. Calendars on the walls flap in the slipstream of trucks; ceiling fans whisk the exhaust fumes of the street.”

“In general, a kind of affected incompetence characterised the behaviour of the city’s rich, who would ring for a servant to look for their car keys, or summon a waiter to pick up the wine bottle that stood in front of them and pour its contents into their glass.”

“During the ‘beautification’ of the city prior to the Commonwealth Games, one could see men, women, and children painting kerbs and fences with their bare hands, their arms stained with paint up to the elbows.”

His friend Amit tells him: “Have you ever wondered why it’s [buying a train ticket] such a nightmare? It is deliberately kept like that. Half of Indian chaos is the deliberate strategy of the bureaucracy. Because if things were efficient, there would be no reason to pay bribes. Ticket counters in stations are big sources of unofficial money.”

Due to drought and water depletion “whole sectors of the city have run out of groundwater and are supplied only by water trucks. There is a new five-star hotel that has no water: its water needs---baths, laundry, swimming pool, sauna---are all supplied by trucks which come at night in lines of a hundred or more.”

On the middle class and their servants: “Servants’ salaries were not a reflection of their contribution to the household but rather a kind of charitable donation given in spite of their incompetence. The middle classes were fond of seeing themselves as under-appreciated benefactors and their image of the poor was not as a productive engine but as a pack of parasites living off their own intelligence and hard work.”

[Marks54 · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book is an effort by an English-Indian journalist to recover his roots and tell the story of https://www.goodreads.com/#Delhi. He does this through a series of interviews with a wide cross-section of people in Delhi, in which they tell their stories of success and failure within this huge mega city. The accounts provided are believable and the story is well written. A recent book to compare this to is Katherine Boo's Beyond the Beautiful Forevers, about life in a slum in Mumbai. That book is perhaps more focused but Dasgupta's book provides a wide ranging, complex, and rich view of Delhi that will require some processing.

This book unfolds on several levels. Most immediately, it is the story of Delhi since the Indian regulatory reforms of 1991 that ended the so-called "license raj" and ushered in a promotion of more market-based reforms that have spurred India's strong economic growth since 1991. More broadly, the book traces the history of India since independence in 1947 and the huge social turmoil of the partition of the Raj into India and Pakistan, which resulted in the mass migration of millions from their homes and the deaths of over a million people due to religious violence and mob action. This makes the history of Delhi in part of history of decolonization and the efforts to form a new national identity where there had not really been one - as opposed to myriad local identities. There is even a broader stream of history in which Delhi has been built, sacked, and rebuilt numerous times over the centuries. Finally, this is in part a story of globalization, in which market forces create a small caste of Indian super-rich while the vast majority of the country receives few benefits and the middle class is caught in between. Indeed, the picture of Delhi as an odd mixture of gated communities of the super rich mixed in with crumbling infrastructure and millions of poor living in nearly unspeakable conditions is one of the scariest ones in the book. The corruption involved is also striking, with Delhi coming across as a well developed kleptocracy run by a small group of thugs that has the bureaucracy bought off to serve them. This is not a pretty picture, especially once one realizes that Delhi is likely not much different in its corruption from several other of the mega-cities that have sprung up in the last three decades.

The author is not excessively preachy and does attempt to draw some conclusions in the final chapter. It is not clear what to say, however. The author has served the reader best by presenting these amazing profiles of people in Delhi, including the good, the bad, and the odd.

The book was a very engaging read.

... as an aside, I was also left wondering about the title. Capital here clearly refers to Delhi's role as India's capital. However, given the recent attention that Thomas Piketty's book received, I have to wonder if the author and publisher were aware. Dasgupta's book is very much about income inequality, especially the gross inequality that has arisen in India in the time covered by the book. There is the same focus in Piketty, of course, although "capital" for him has a different meaning based in economics. While the similarities may not be intended, it is hard not to think of income inequality and all of its negative consequences when reading about Delhi.

[Manu · Rating 4 out of 5]

Much has been written about the Maximum City - fiction and non fiction - and it continues to be the muse of many authors. But other than Dalrymple's City of Djinns, I have not really read a book on Delhi. Add to that Rana Dasgupta's superb play on the title itself - Capital - and this was a book I had to read. I am really glad it didn't disappoint.
There are many Delhis, as Dalrymple brought out in his book. The city has existed in many forms across centuries, and many of them live side by side - Mughal, British, post-partition, post 1984, and the one that the author stresses most on - post 1991. It is easy to see many parts of the commentary as a standard impact of globalisation, but if you have lived on both sides of the 90s, you would know what an enormous impact liberalisation has had on our lives. But I get ahead of myself!
The opening quote in Chapter One itself is one that lays down the intent and potential of the book and its subject - to paraphrase, while Calcutta owned the 19th century, Mumbai the 20th, the 21st will belong to Delhi. This chapter has a personal angle to it but in that, also captures partition and the mix of cultures that make up the metropolis. We then move on to globalisation, and see its manifestations through various points of view. The early entrepreneurs who thought up Gurgaon and its BPOs and brought in a wave of folks from across the country, the new age professionals who embodied a lifestyle hitherto unknown in India, and private hospitals and the public's battles with them.
The next couple of chapters are on changing family structures, a perspective on the roots of increasing violence on women. It then shifts to various other aspects that have had an influence on the city's ever changing nature - land ownership, communal dynamics, businesses and military, corruption, the parallel economy and the city's own bourgeois, and the poorest of the poor who have no one to speak for them. In essence, the other meaning of capital, and the rise of an oligarchy which has replaced the traditional rich to set the tone of the city.
The final chapter was my favourite. The author points out how Delhi is probably a much better pointer of what 21st centuries will be compared to other great cities which are being carried forward by the momentum of 19th and 20th century capitalism. And through the eyes of a 70 year old and his perspective on the fundamental system that spawned the very first versions of this city - water - we see the inisignificance of what humans have achieved. Despite us, Delhi will go on.

[Marek Pawlowski · Rating 5 out of 5]

Niezwykła książka, od której naprawdę trudno było się oderwać. Dzięki niej o wiele lepiej zrozumiałem obecną polityczną i gospodarczą sytuację Indii. Przeniesienie tam ogromnej ilości firm jak na przykład call center czy też ogólnie stworzenie z tego kraju zagłębia outsourcingowego spowodowało znaczące przemiany kulturowe w tym dość konserwatywnym państwie. Autorowi udało się ukazać skalę i znaczenie tych przemian w tak niezwykły sposób, że na pewno jeszcze do tej książki powrócę. Mistrzowski reportaż.

This is a really extraordinary book which was really difficult to put down. Thanks to it I’ve had now a better understanding of the current political and economical situation of India. Moving there a large number of companies like call centres and creating out of this country the heart of the outsourcing world triggered many cultural changes in this very conservative nation. The author shows us the scale and meaning of these changes in such a brilliant way that certainly I will come back to this book. This is just a masterpiece of reportage.

[Andrew · Rating 4 out of 5]

I feel I know (parts) of Delhi well now.

This is one of those sociological rambles (ramble in the walking sense) that journeys into different parts of the city in search of illustrative examples for bigger themes: history, class, economy, family, and so on. So it's easy to read but don't expect the same structured layout you would in a more formal urban study. I believe the neologism is edutainment. Well, this is successful edutainment.

A minor point: despite being a native, Rana Dasgupta is obviously writing for a Western audience, so the question of Orientalism must arise. The descriptions of unimaginably abject poverty, sweeping generalizations about the culture's cosmological outlook, and of course fabulous wealth do harken back to early travellers' accounts of the East. So I would read more as reportage than hard fact.

Follow me on Twitter: @Dr_A_Taubman

[Ligeia · Rating 4 out of 5]

storie di quotidiana alienazione

interviste alla classe borghese di Delhi condotte da uno scrittore anglo indiano,
interessante sotto tutti i punti di vista è un saggio sull'economia e la politica indiane, in pratica
tutto quello che Rushdie ha insinuato nei suoi mondi di favola qua è spiegato e raccontato
con chiarezza, come fosse l'altra parte dello specchio
la corsa all'arricchimento, la corruzione, i problemi religiosi e l'arcaismo dei meccanismi sociali sono qui illustrati tutti in fila e motivati con interessanti panoramiche storiche, un libro irrinunciabile per chi non si accontenta della propaganda, l'India non è un povero paese sfruttato, è quello che sfrutta più di tutti in Asia, più anche della Cina, e il punto è che se ne vantano...

[Aditi · Rating 2 out of 5]

I couldn't help compare this book to Katherine Boo's Behind the Beautiful Forevers, which while being less expansive in its scope (a portrait of one small slum rather than an entire city and century) was much more profound and insightful about people's motivations, fears and desires - as well as their relationship to their city. This book has some entertaining vignettes, but read more like an outsider's perspective rather an intimate, deep look into the people and places it covers.

[Kierstin Van Camp-Horn · Rating 3 out of 5]

Although several of the topics covered in the book were quiet interesting, especially since I recently moved to New Delhi, the scope was limited. The author only spoke with people of Delhi's rising middle class but this is a city of 18 million people from very different backgrounds and living under very different conditions.

[Neil Bhatiya · Rating 4 out of 5]

A freewheeling survey of the new New Delhi, showing how India has and has not changed as a result of its economic opening in the 1990s. While some are richer, many more remain poor, and find themselves in a society that is a lot more precarious and buffeted by far-reaching cultural changes.

[poodles · Rating 4 out of 5]

I try to read a book that is set in the city I'm travelling to, especially if I am going there for the first time. When I went to Delhi, however, I was spoiled for choice and overwhelmed by all the options out there. At first I considered Dalrymple's City of Djinns but it seemed to be much more about the ancient history of the city, and I wanted something that could help contexualise life in the city today.

After a lot of research, I came across Rana Dasgupta's Capital: The Eruption of Delhi. It is probably the best introduction I could have asked for to the city. Dasgupta mixes discussions of the region's history, politics, and upheaval, with interviews of Delhi residents from the middle and upper classes of society. He makes a great point at the beginning of the book, that to be middle class in Delhi is still to be a rarefied breed, a very small percentage of the city, and an even more minuscule percentage of the region and surrounding states.

If you are going to Delhi for the first time, read this. I got a real sense of the traumas that have shaped the capital of India, the different communities that have lived and sometimes left this place, and how capital - its acquisition, preservation, and loss - is such a massive driver of force here. The interview format may not be to everyone's liking as it can feel like you're just reading a transcript, but I personally enjoyed the look into the different people's mindsets.

My one criticism of the book would be that Dasgupta has a tendency to overly romanticise the Mughal era of rule and criticise the British colonial rule. While the latter are certainly no darlings, the former were just as full of flaws and cruelty (as any 1000 year empire is bound to be). Take those parts with a hefty pinch of salt, because otherwise you will leave thinking Delhi was a paragon of idyllic perfection and communal harmony until the Brits came along. They divided and conquered, sure, but there were enough preexisting tears in the communal fabric for them to work with.

[Malaika Colaso · Rating 5 out of 5]

Dasgupta’s work is exceptional in its approach, treating the city as one might treat a novel, reading and analyzing its fabric with meticulous care.

This might be my favorite non fiction of the year (or of many years idk I don’t read too much non fic)

Getting to know a city through literature is an incredible experience. I highly recommend this book.

He uses a bunch of fancy new words as if he’s writing with a thesaurus nearby which is kind of amusing. Also, he’s like so dramatic in how he writes that’s also very amusing but whatever IT IS SO WORTH IT!!! You don’t even have to believe in everything he says, it’s just beautiful to see someone analyze the city and even though you’re getting to know NCR and the variety of people who live here, you really get to know the narrator because it’s all his perspective. It’s wonderful. SO GOOD.

[Emily Tucker · Rating 4 out of 5]

I skimmed through quite a few chapters. The stories he tells of Delhi and specific people are fascinating and eye opening. However, the specific themes throughout them all are ultimately the depravity of people and society and the brokenness depravity causes. (Although the author himself would not use this phrasing.) I appreciate how the author shows that these problems of greed, violence, and corruption are not new for Delhi but reach back over her whole history. The glimmer of hope he provides the reader is that the people have always endured, rebuilt and channeled the pain and death into creating good things.
I’ve come to understand the way Delhi stands out from other Indian cities. And this book has helped me understand current issues in Delhi today.

[Rakesh Sarangi · Rating 4 out of 5]

I picked up this book whilst I was on a trip to Delhi. The whole Delhi vibe enamored and alienated me so strongly that I had this sudden urge to read about how it all arrived to this point in time. And this book did not disappoint.
Having spend all of my professional life in Bengaluru, one can imagine how alienated I felt in Delhi. I just could not wrap my head around the social fabric that wraps in and around Delhi. This book enlightened me on where does Delhi get its 'Delhi-ness' from. And now I would be a lot more comfortable around Delhites from now on.