Lutyens' Complex

CLIMATE change will likely make the Delhi-Mumbai comparison moot because one will burn and the other will drown. For millions of working people in these two cities, the treadmill of making ends meet, making rent and making it to work on time, makes competing claims to cosmopolitanism feel like nakhra, the narcissism of an English-speaking middle class with time to spare and points to score.

- Mukul Kesavan

For anglophone Mumbaikars, their city is the nearest thing India has to the western metropolis: nearly London, almost New York, Urbs Prima in Indis with Bollywood bolted on. In this telling, Nariman Point is Wall Street and Bandra West is Brooklyn and the Gateway announces India in the way that Lady Liberty embodies the United States.

For their countrified cousins in Delhi, the capital’s hybrid achievement is to have grafted a Western capitol on to the ruins of several old, superseded cities; think Washington D.C. or Canberra, with History en suite.

I grew up in Lutyens’s Delhi in the government housing supplied by the state to its employees. These were whitewashed homes of various sizes classified by letters and assigned by rank. So if you lived in A/B type houses, it meant your father (more rarely your mother) was at least an additional secretary, whereas C-I or C-II homes housed more middling joint secretaries. Our semi-detached house along with its neighbours looked on to a reasonably level, hedged-in green that was made for playing cricket.

This wasn’t cricket as played in a public maidan (ground) like Shivaji Park. New Delhi in the 1960s wasn’t a high-density metropolis where public parks were shared out in a dozen cricket matches. It was a babu pastoral where space was no consideration, and sarkari children had the run of the greens that their ‘colonies’ enclosed.