Delhi [Paperback]

I was born in Delhi and lived there for 26 years of my life. Growing up in the city that seemed to be full of village idiots more than city-fools was challenging. And on top of that being a female made it worse. You couldn't cross a street without having cat-calls and if you took public transport, it meant getting felt up by smelly pervs. I have next to no fond memories of being / walking around in Delhi. It was always a chore an errand. Both my parents were born and brought up in Delhi, they love the city. I hated it.

As I read through this book, it was as if brought right back in front of me in all its glory minus the cat calls. This book helped dig up some buried happy memories of my own city and did so in a very honest and vivid way. I love this book.

I bought this book as a read when flying to Delhi on business with a few days to spare and read it there while visiting many of the places described. This is an excellent, entertaining and at times very funny book, which captured my experiences over the week I was in the city. Delhi is a great fascinating city and this book helps inspire you to explore, understand and get to like the place. A good easy travel read.

Delhi, a "megacity" of 15 million plus people, with historical ruins to rival Istanbul, Cairo and Rome alongside modern tower blocks, is going through rapid change. Millar has lived in Delhi as a BBC correspondent, yet he wanders through the city more like a backpacker than a "Delhiwalla", taking a strange spiral route which makes it difficult for the reader to follow. I kept having to refer to his hand-drawn maps and even then I was confused.

To be fair, Miller is not just doing the well-trodden tourist routes. He tackles many of the backstreets and end-of-Metro outposts, unearthing genuine surprises (such as the Delhi slaughterhouse) and providing entertaining anecdotes on the way. Yet for all his sympathy and affection for the place, he somehow fails to connect with Delhi people. He comes across various officials, vendors, street urchins and other individuals who are simply puzzled at the intentions and questions of this (to me) rather sad and lonely foreigner. In Gurgaon, the gleaming new Delhi suburb, he laments that nothing happens to him and there is no one to speak to, yet he shelters from a rainstorm in a security guard's hut "in the invigorating company of a garrulous Japanese businessman and a flirtatious teenage Gurgaon college student". What do they think of life in Gurgaon? We never get to know.

Miller has written a city travel book for the internet age jumping from scene to scene as if wandering from link to link, occasionally returning to homepage before resuming his journey. He resorts to google for snippets of information (whether or not it has to do with Delhi or even India) and google maps for close ups of streets or buildings. He quotes often anonymous bloggers' without saying whether they were posted a day, a year, or two years ago - and that matters in such a fast-changing city. Miller even intriguingly uses SimCity (the computer game) for "insights" into city growth. The result is a pleasant, quirky read, enjoyable enough for the casual reader but the book is crying out for a better sense of the human experience of what it is to live in the Megacity. He is shocked at the plight of the ragpickers but that scene is a fleeting one. Without many more human voices to explain the ever-widening contrasts of Delhi, I could just as well read wikipedia. Despite this, four stars for making the offbeat so interesting.