BBC journalist Sam Miller describes Delhi as "sprawling beyond its own borders, swallowing up villages and farmland, sucking in migrants, spewing out pollution." Exploring Delhi on foot, Miller repeatedly finds himself in strange situations.
He wanders into an open-air slaughterhouse: "I saw one man in the near-distance using his knife to point me out to his friend," he writes, "I waved cheerily at them. They glared back at me with frozen eyes." Miller wisely flees. He walks into the chaos of a Delhi railroad station: "Bare lightbulbs of low wattage. ... A pigeon with its head inside a crisp packet. A railway official strutting past, stiff with self-importance. Bedraggled children."
Signs of India's economic boom are everywhere. Miller stumbles into a Western-style shopping mall, "a huge enclosed courtyard ringed by five layers of shops, linked by escalators, with a low hum of Muzak, and the smell of cheap cleaning fluid." Despite India's reputation as a spiritual Mecca, Miller finds that materialism is running rampant: "Delhi is a city on the make. The wealthy fear only the taxman. There is no shame in acquisitiveness; and no vulgarity in broadcasting the cost of acquisition." Bling is definitely in.
Miller wonders whether this chaotic city of 20 million can handle more growth. If his book is any evidence, Delhi has utterly failed to manage the expansion it's already experienced. Illuminating Delhi's bizarre charms and eye-opening extremes, Miller's account will surely resonate with travelers, or anyone interested in this exotic, booming metropolis.
CHUCK LEDDY
