Peter Parker

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

A review of Rana Dasgupta's Capital: A Portrait of 21st-century Delhi. The upper crust and underbelly of India's capital

A dreadful warning: a fisherman paddles through a tide of toxic waste on the Yamuna river, against a backdrop of smog and high-rise construction [Getty Images/Shutterstock/iStock/Alamy]

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’.

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