How capitalism destroyed a generation of Indians

Subscribe to enjoy similar stories.In the history of literature, several outstanding novels have captured the personal and societal challenges associated with upward mobility. Once a man could make his fortune through intrepid adventure (R.L.

Stevenson), while a woman could do so by marrying the right man (Jane Austen). In the last 30 years, the “office novel” has charted how capitalism “plunders the sensuality of the body,” to quote the scholar Terry Eagleton.

Douglas Coupland’s Microserfs (1995), Walter Kirn’s Up in the Air (2001) and Joshua Ferris’s Then We Came to the End (2007) are some of the finest works of this subgenre.To those worthy names I would add Mamta Kalia’s Daud (2000), recently translated into English by Jerry Pinto as Rat Race. A six-decade veteran of Hindi literature, Kalia was awarded the 2025 Sahitya Akademi award last month for her memoir, Jeete Jee Allahabad.

Set in the late 1990s, Rat Race follows Pawan Pande, an enterprising youth from Allahabad who goes off to study at IIM-Ahmedabad and later to work at a private LPG firm. In 120-odd pages, we see how Pawan abandons his cosy family life and adopts the insular Way of the Yuppie, much to the chagrin of his parents.

Through this gulf between their hopes and Pawan’s skyrocketing aspirations, Kalia paints a terrifying portrait of a newly liberalised India, caught between contradictory belief systems.The first half of the novel focuses on Pawan and his largely male friends’ group, “boys who lived like princes at home” before throwing themselves head-first into corporate life, sacrificing food, sleep and familial relations. Kalia describes the everyday absurdities of their lives with humour and compassion—for example, their habit of calling every