Capital musings

By Rana Dasgupta

This is not how people drive in other Indian cities. But Delhi is a place where people generally assume — far more, say, than in Bangalore or Mumbai —that the world is programmed to deny them everything, and that making a proper life will, therefore, require constant hustle — and manipulation of the rules.

Everyone, myself included, uses bribes and connections to get the things they need — a visa, a driving licence, a quick resolution of a legal case — and if this city seems obsessed by status, it is for good reason: power, wealth and networks deliver an immeasurably easier and better life.

People who run schools and hospitals spend much of their time not running schools and hospitals, but attending to the list of important people and their hangers-on who are haranguing them for preferential, queue-jumping treatment — which throws the systems of those places into a disarray as the one here on the roads… One might think that a place of such inequalities would breed democratic fantasies but it is not the case: Delhi’s fantasies are feudal.

Those who have rather little social power respect the privileges of those who have a lot — perhaps hoping that one day they will enjoy the same for themselves… Look at the advertising, with its incoherent mash of consumerism and aristocracy: this mass-produced item will turn you into the person who never has to stop at the barriers that hold back everyone else.

From “Capital: A Portrait of Twenty-First Century Delhi”.