Aaah shit here we go again. William Dalrymple (WD hereafter) loves Delhi, there's nothing new about it. He travelled around Delhi (and has been living there since), looked at all the important monuments which are desperately in need of some attention and observed the daily events of Delhi which escape the eye of casual observers or citizens of our country.

This book is about those experiences. and they are pretty entertaining and chilling experiences.

I would have loved to dwell on those experiences and what this book is all about had something not happened in between these 2 days after I had finished reading the book.

For some reason Delhi has always occupied a special place in Indian history. During all the periods of history, even mythological significance. India's history has been the history of Delhi and vice-versa. I would have accepted this significance attached to its importance in the history but I wouldn't anymore. Delhi's history was rich. and rightly so it has been given more than fair amount of credit and attention for that.

But this showering of attention on this particular city has deprived other important places of India their due credit. Our textbooks are silent or reticent on these regional histories. There has always been this Dilli bias in our history and it has got to be called out, sooner rather than later.

So, with that being said, I loved the book. It is an extremely entertaining and informing account of a year spent in our capital, but it hasn’t been written while remaining in the capital. The author has connected Delhi through different parts of the world, some of those roads led to Scotland, England, Pakistan, Ajmer, and other nearby places of Delhi.

I well and truly fell in love with the city after reading WD’s book, The last Mughal. City of Djinns being an earlier account couldn’t capture all of WD’s love and information, I guess. I hated Delhi with all my heart for the short amount of time I lived there. Everything about it felt like a disaster. I was ignorant of WD’s books on Delhi I guess, for then the opposite would have happened.

Delhi for WD is a work of art and he can’t get enough of this piece of art which looks pathetic to so many of its onlookers.

I mostly read this book with a feeling of disappointment at having lost such a culturally rich and architecturally advanced metropolis. Lost would be the wrong word but how else are we to come to terms with the fact that so many of the miracles of Delhi aren’t around anymore.

And yet some new features have been added to that great city of the past, some good many bad. It is India in microcosm and yet it quite isn’t. Dilli is a feeling I guess, a longing of the rich past that once was but exists no more.