The city with a capital advantage. Review on New Delhi

Every city has its own merits and demerits. Any city that allows you the freedom to be what you are, recognizes your ability and offers you quality life best fits once choice as a better city.

For good reasons and for being in civil services Delhi gave me the living in ‘Ivory Tower’ feeling and a sense of belonging. According to my experience the merits of this city outweigh the demerits.

Merits:

1)Delhi soaks in the splendor of its parks, monuments, wide avenues and beautiful women. It is the oldest city in the world with more ancient monuments than Rome, Athens or Cairo.To name a few:

Qutub Minar> is the most fascinating feast for a tourist’s eye built in 1199 A.D., it has not caught rust ever since.

Red Fort is another masterpiece of architecture.

Jantar Mantaris a huge sun-dial for observing movements of stars and planets.

India Gate is a majestic structure with plush green lawn in the backdrop.It is a war memorial in memory of soldiers killed in the second world war.

Lotus Templeis a recent architectural marvel of the Bahai faith, it is lotus shaped made mostly of marble.

2)Delhi has more than a dozen parks, Budda Jayanti, Nehru Park, Talkatora gardens, Lodhi park etc.,

3)Geographically it is the travel hub of northern India. Its an excellent base for visiting, the Taj Mahal in Agra, the grandeur and color of Rajasthan. Hold your breath! for trekking, river rafting and mountaineering too.

4)New Delhi is the cultural capital of India. Delhi still has remnants of Urdu culture in which Pakistani poets and singers feel it as home. It is in Delhi that singers, musicians, painters, dancers (the fashion capital !) came for patronage, acclaim and recognition. Not to speak of dress designers shows, Exibitions, International festivals, Seminars etc,.

5)New Delhi , being the capital city, is the hotbed of all decision making processes ,International, Industrial, commercial, or political. You can feel the pulse of political activity here .As all activities , events ,are conducted in a mammoth scale and the city is in focus of worldwide attention ,the events generally live up to the International standards.

6)Delhi’s innovative five star entertainment: At the Djinns in the Hyatt, you can see a Jamaican band playing popular music in one corner, people busy at pool table, and other trying their hand at darts. The sports bar at Radisson, has a foreign band, while party freaks play basketball and pool in the pub.

Demerits:

1)Delhi is one of the most polluted cities. The horn-tooting cars , autos, ageing buses thunder along Delhi’s roads emanating exhaust fumes and covering pedestrians and labourers along the road side with a thick layer of dust. The noise pollution is deafening in peak hours.

2)You are two and a half times more likely to find yourself the victim of a crime in Delhi as compared to the rest of the country.Delhi is not a safe place for women,It accounts for nearly 40 percent of the cases of various atrocities on women reported from the country’s 23 mega cities.

3)Delhi is the status oriented.People here are phony, constantly angling for attention and Jockeying for position. It is also the gossip capital, about politicians and their mistresses, salacious gossip about private lives of film stars, about middle-aged, middle heavy, but somehow powerful women, and the “Dharmender-effect” of senior civil servants. People mind their neighbors’s interests,coming and going with keener interest.

To sum up ,Clearly the merits outweigh the demerits.

I echo the sentiment of its greatest son, the poet Asadullah Khan Ghalib:

“I asked my soul, “What is Delhi ?” It replied: “the world is the body, Delhi is its soul.