Delhi: Old, New, and Newest

Diwan-I-Khas (Hall of Private Audience), Red Fort, (old) Delhi

By the time we made it to Delhi, in all honesty, we were ready to move on from India. The day of our arrival, we hid out in our small hotel room, unwilling to tackle the tangled streets of the old city or to try and figure out the journey across town to where the government buildings stood. Despite our bad attitudes, the city turned out to be rather a pleasant surprise.

Delhi is a series of historical cities, overlaid one on top of the other, each in fact constructed as the Indian capital of a foreign power: Afghan, Mughal, British. "Old Delhi," such as it is, survives from the Mughal era, when it was the seat of power for one of the world's greatest empires. We visted the Red Fort, whose geopolitical history, if surprisingly brief, is no less impressive than that of, say, Beijing's Forbidden City -- though its architecture, while distinguished, is not as spectacular as that of its Chinese counterpart.

Old Delhi is linked to the British-built New Delhi by a conveyance of the newest Delhi: the city's fresh-out-of-the-wrapper metro system, which can whisk you rather disorientingly from a chaotic and rubbish-strewn alley in one district to a splendid monumental avenue in another. Our three-day stay wasn't enough to develop any sense of how it all fit together, and we saw almost nothing of the city's vast slums, but at the very least we were afforded a glimpse of the kind of contrasts that make Delhi -- old, new, and newest -- in its own way a suitable encapsulation of the nation it governs today: no longer as the seat of a foreign emperor, but as the capital of a complex and often disorienting democracy.

A row of white Ambassadors, traditional car of India's government elites, outside central government buildings near the Presidential residence, New Delhi

Fountain and government buildings, New Delhi

The brand-new Delhi metro