What used to be an administrative town has now become one of India’s biggest hubs for the global economy.

Rana Dasgupta, author of the new book Capital: The Eruption of Delhi, lives there now, and says that he experienced this change firsthand.

“The whole city had been shaken up, and people’s inner worlds had changed, too,” he said. “I thought it was a chapter in the onward march of capitalism that needed to be written about and recorded.”

Dasgupta dismisses the idea that a modern country has to become Westernized.

“Some people in the West will look at it and say, ‘We know this, this happened in our past. And what will happen in the future is also known to us, because it happened in our past,'” he said. “There’s nothing about the Western past that teaches us anything about the Asian future.”

Whatever that future may hold, Dasgupta says, residents of India’s capital city are optimistic.

“The only way forward is forward for people in India, and I think they think the 21st century is going to deliver all the things that the 20th century couldn’t.”