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| Home - City Guide - Delhi - City Overview | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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City Overview Delhi Jawaharlal Nehru, India's first prime minister, described Delhi (Delhi) rather romantically when he said 'the air we breathe is full of the dust and fragrances of the past'. Delhi is actually a very twentieth-century slipstream of jeering voices and screeching rubber, perfumed by spices, in an atmosphere laden with the day's 2000-tonne effluent of pollutants. The assault on the senses takes a physical and emotional toll. The leper in rags, tendering an outstretched paw from a wooden board on wheels; the stony-faced mother and child demanding Rupees or chapatis; the tangled heads of children rapping on taxi windows at traffic lights - inconceivably these are not the very poorest of humanity. Indeed, if Delhi continues to grow at its present rate, the encroaching slums will have taken over by 2001, and 57% of the 13 million inhabitants will have no water, 41% no sewerage and 40% no power. The infrastructural chaos of modern Delhi amounts to little more than a layer of industrial dust resting on 3000 years of history. The traditional Seven Cities of Delhi give a somewhat simplified overview of the intricate strata of the successive civilisations that have occupied the site of today's capital city. The schism continues with the modern division into Old Delhi and New Delhi. Founded in the seventeenth century, the warren of Old Delhi - or Shahjahanabad - contains the most splendid remnants of Delhi's old cities, while New Delhi - custom-built by the British as the nation's capital in 1911 - is founded on the graceful urban architecture of the Raj and stamped with the colonial imprint of architect Edwin Lutyens. Omitted from the canonical Seven Cities is the mythological city of Indraprastha, featured in the epic Mahabharata, and centred near present-day Purana Qila. Today, Delhi is a city that many visitors leave soon after arriving. Summer's heat, winter's fogs and the monsoon's permeating damp combine with round-the-clock demands of beggars, tour guides, taxi and rickshaw drivers to make Delhi a frustrating experience for Westerners used to moving faster, in more comfort, with less unwanted attention. The legacy of the nation's sheer bureaucratic opacity means that every transaction necessarily becomes an involved negotiation, and getting things done inevitably entails paying someone to drive, wait, pedal, haul bags, clean, cook or shop. Baksheesh (backhanders) make everything smoother and speedier - the rule is to pay little and often. In spite of any initial impression of an overwhelming, teeming underclass, there is also considerable wealth in Delhi, as a quick drive through the privileged residential areas of the Diplomatic Enclave will testify. India has a huge middle class, typified in the capital by a new, cosmopolitan, upwardly mobile people, out of touch with the prickly nationalism of India's founding generation. |
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