The possibilities of writing about the city in Delhi are many. The city provides innumerable subjects for creating fiction and non-fiction,...
The possibilities of writing about the city in Delhi are many. The city provides innumerable subjects for creating fiction and non-fiction, and, over time, it trains the writer to seek experiences that can inspire stories.
I began writing in the beginning of 2010s. Delhi was being transformed quickly then as it was the decade of city-wide beautification and landscaping drives. The coming Commonwealth Games had thrown the government into a frenzy, and there was endless construction leading up to the Games. After the event, there was a whole phase of corrective construction as some of the projects were redone or undone.
For at least five or six years at that time, it seemed like the construction would never end and the roads would never be clear of debris. , India gained quite a reputation for being a problematic developing nation at that time. I went to study Contemporary Literature at Loyola University, Chicago in 2012, where we discussed precisely this in class while studying The White Tiger.
The professor had brought a news article on a six-hour traffic jam in Mumbai. I was the only Indian in class and was exceedingly uncomfortable with this notion of India abroad (back then, there seemed to be...
