Initially looking for people within a notorious housing project to take a multiple-choice survey on urban poverty, Venkatesh never imagined that as a result of that graduate assignment he would befriend a gang leader and spend the better part of a decade inside the projects under JT's protection, documenting what he saw there. His report is a brazen, page-turning, and fundamentally honest view into the morally ambiguous, highly intricate, often corrupt struggle to survive in what is tantamount to an urban war zone. And it's also the story of a complicated friendship between Sudhir and JT - two young and ambitious men a universe apart.