Saturday Morning With Jack Tame

As the capital of the world’s largest democracy, Delhi embodies the essence of modern India – a vivid paradox of old and new, rich and poor, foreign and familiar. It’s been fourteen years since my last visit and the economic transformation is ever-present. High rises, swanky malls and residential colonies housing the booming middle-class are mushrooming everywhere. As my engaging Wendy Wu Tours guide Girish remarked, as we were whisked into the city from the airport, “Delhi is more than a mere city, it has morphed into the national capital region.” With the metropolitan population now nudging 30 million, Delhi is a megalopolis and on-track to becoming the world’s most populous city in three years’ time.  Our hotel was in New Delhi, the more modern, planned city within a city, that was built by the British in 1911 and replaced Kolkata as the national capital, twenty years later. In a city notorious for its air pollution, which is supposedly steadily improving, one of the great paradoxes of New Delhi is t