Portrayal of Middle-Class Urban Delhi: Macro Issues of Violence and Crime

No month in the calendar of the modern Indian nation is as significant as August. Its significance, particularly, in the life of Delhi, the capital city of post-Independence India, is matchless; it is the celebrated month of freedom, hope, festivities, monsoon rains, and so many more joys. But Delhi’s Augusts, as Sudeep Chakravarti in his latest non-fiction shows, have equally been about loss, hopelessness and despair too. It is mainly about one particularly dark Delhi August that Chakravarti writes in this book. But as we shall see, it is as much about the month of August as it is about the city of Delhi, its half a century old recent past, its trials and tribulations and, as Chakravarti so elegantly phrases, its ‘descent from grace’.