![]() ![]() Dalrymple uses this rising and falling of Delhi as the theme of his year-long journey of organized serendipity. ![]() Most people who visit India's capital learn that some sort of city has existed on the spot for millennia, and that it was destroyed and built up again and again, perhaps as many as 21 times, by successive waves of invaders. Dalrymple, a 29-year-old Scottish writer with a dry wit and an unquenchable appetite for history and architecture, brings the characters, mosques, temples and stories of New Delhi to life in a new and refreshing way. ![]() I was wrong, as William Dalrymple's City of Djinns: A Year in Delhi makes clear. Although I lived happily in New Delhi for three and a half years in the mid-1980s, to me the capital's present and past could never compare to the passions and histories of India's other great, troubled cities - Bombay, Madras and Calcutta. There is also the Delhi of the old city, a teeming cacophony of hawkers, beggars, chickens, goats and blaring Hindi music. ![]() Polluted, overcrowded and in perpetual, rubble-strewn expansion and decay, India's capital is both a bureaucrat's town of broad avenues lined with crumbling government bungalows and an expensive playground of hotel restaurants and fashion boutiques for a newly rich Punjabi merchant class. $23 NEW DELHI at first encounter does not present itself as one of the glorious cities of the world. CITY OF DJINNS A Year in Delhi By William Dalrymple HarperCollins. ![]()
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