"The system of policing in India has so many constraints that unless the person has a special kind of inner motivation to pursue something, it's going to be very hard to get results. Inspector Prashant Kumar has that. He is an amalgamation of a real person and some fictional tropes. I've had the desire to write crime fiction for a very long time and as a journalist, I got to hang out with a lot of Delhi cops over a period of about two years. The police have miserable lives, most of them. Their work involves constantly seeing the worst side of humanity; they see the worst tragedies, death. There's also work pressure and the work load. It is extremely stressful and it leaves most officers with absolutely no time for family. All of this has its personal cost and I wanted to bring it all in. Now, I think twice before judging the police. A lot of them try very hard to make things work, to be fair, to complete investigations, to respond to emergencies, and some are very heroic too" 

— Rudraneil Sengupta, author, 'The Beast Within', talks to Manjula Narayan about his police procedural set in Delhi that zooms into the mansions of the rich and the abject slums of the poor, looks at the workings of child traffickers, and examines the edge of violence amid the rapid change in the capital's ever-receding rural fringe  

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