Word: delhi
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...Bhagat's irreverence stops short of tearing down the ivory tower: all three of his main characters manage to graduate, and all seem poised to follow in the successful footsteps of the author himself, who graduated from New Delhi's IIT in 1995 and now works in Hong Kong for an investment bank. Bhagat was the mastermind of a website promoting the book, offering a monthly contest and his own e-mail address for fan letters. In that sense, even a critical alum like Bhagat makes IIT proud...
...control where or when the rains come, of course. But India has the power to alleviate its water woes, according to Sumita Dasgupta of the independent, New Delhi-based Centre for Science and Environment. "India has a lot of water," she says. "Even in drought years, we get enough. We just don't manage it." P. Chengala Reddy of the Indian Farmers and Industry Alliance lobby group goes further: "There is absolutely nil long-term planning." What management there is, says Dasgupta, ignores traditional methods of water storage in dry areas-such as the now disused network of channels...
...taking to the roads in record numbers, crash rates are growing out of control. Car ownership in China jumped 41% between 1999 and 2002, while over the same period accidents increased twice as fast, by more than 83%. P.K. Sikdar, director of the Central Road Research Institute, a New Delhi-based traffic consultancy, ranks the carnage in India right up there with his country's natural disasters?except that "earthquakes and cyclones don't come every year. Road accidents come routinely," he says. "Like clockwork, more than 80,000 people [a year] simply get wiped out on our roads...
...something rotten in today's fully wired world. Hopscotching among a host of minor characters and a variety of geographic backdrops, Kunzru attacks the absurdities of a superfast, superficial society. Kunzru's gift is that he can relate with equal authority how unbalanced things are today in London, Brussels, Delhi or suburban California-where, he writes, "Anyone on foot ... is one of four things: poor, foreign, mentally ill or jogging." Like Don DeLillo, the great American novelist whom he admires, Kunzru is part of a modern breed of fiction writers who double up as cultural critics, describing the tastes, sounds...
...Massimo Calabresi. With reporting by Aparisim Ghosh/Baghdad and Alex Perry/New Delhi...