Delhi Durbar

Book excerpt: `I was taught to take everything I could by any means possible without feeling any sense of remorse, and that coloured the way I saw the world, a world where the strong stomp on everyone below them and doing good is for the naïve. I had been accidentally groomed to meet the requirements of the economic miracle that hit India in the early nineties, where the needs of the individual finally began to be addressed and seen as important, even necessary. Capitalism started seeping into our very marrow and socialistic gangrene seeped away, having only found a place in history as a well-intentioned failure. Nehru?s dream was finally dead and I think I helped deliver its death knell...? In the heart of Lutyens? Delhi ? as politicians, power-brokers, media moguls, and bureaucrats go peaceably about their business of amassing unlimited personal wealth, occasionally getting ensnared in their own webs of scandal and sleaze ? the President of India, an ex-army chief, throws everyone into shock by defying his rubber-stamp status and threatening to establish military rule. Only Jasjit Sidhu, his sometime son-in-law, erstwhile corporate banker and money launderer, and newly returned to India as personal financial adviser to Prime Minister Paresh Yadav, can bring him to heel. Brilliantly plotted and bitingly written, Delhi Durbar is an astute and gripping political novel, in which the outrageous twists and turns of the empowered corrupt and their fiercely self-serving agendas makes for a political thriller of a uniquely Indian flavour.