A book on postwar Iraq revealing an account of daily life inside the protected Green Zone in Baghdad by NRI journalist Rajiv Chandrasekharan has won Britain’s top prize for non-fiction, the £30,000 BBC Four Samuel Johnson Prize.Imperial Life in the Emerald City by Chandrasekharan, former Baghdad bureau chief of The Washington Post, lays bare the cocooned life led by Americans inside the zone while, outside, Iraqis struggled in chaos. According to the book, more than $ 1.6 billion of Iraq’s oil revenue was paid to US vice-president Cheney’s old firm Halliburton; the Baghdad stock exchange was put in the hands of a 24-year-old who had never worked in finance; and the city’s traffic rules were based on the laws of the US state of Maryland.
