Fiction for a change

When Aatish Taseer arrived in his native Delhi in 2007 after a long stint abroad, he returned to discover, he says, a “double shock”. First, the years away – spent at Amherst College in Massachusetts, and later working for Time magazine in London – had shifted his perspective on his home city, so that even familiar sights now seemed somehow alien.

On top of this, though, came the second shock: the city to which he had returned, Taseer realised, was going through a profound and inescapable transformation, a transformation that was sweeping the entire country and that rendered much of what he knew – even who he was – outdated.

In short, Taseer had returned to the supercharged, cacophonous, sometimes brutal metropolitan sprawl that is called the “New India”.

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