New Delhi: A precious jewel in Indian crown

AS a student in the fifties, I was once on a six-week holiday in India organized by the Foreign Students’ Association.
We were winding up the holiday in Kashmir’s capital Srinagar where the student rates for our fairly adequate accommodation was modest. The group consisted of many nationalities including Arabs, Africans, Asians and a few Europeans.
There was a great deal of sightseeing and we had a chance to meet Krishna Menon, the then foreign minister of India and the closest friend of Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru. He held a press conference during which he consumed a huge quantity of tea with milk and sugar that made him quite irritable.
From Kashmir, we drove or were driven to Pathankot and then traveled by train all the way to New Delhi.
When we reached Delhi, we checked into what were called railway retiring rooms, very modest indeed but rather clean and spacious, which we liked. The boys were in one room and the girls in another. The cost of one room, believe it or not, was one rupee a day. Very cheap food was available nearby.
We had a grand time in the brand new capital of India. For those among us from Mumbai, Madras and Calcutta it was a refreshing change as it was clean, spacious and extremely attractive — indeed even for those coming from London, Nairobi, Amman, Cairo and like me from Aden, the British crown colony in the southernmost corner of Arabia.
It was late summer and as we had spent the hot season in Kashmir, we had no reason to complain. Time was spent walking in the brand new city planned by the British after deciding to shift the capital from Calcutta to the old Mughal center of power. Young as we were, we did not mind the distance to the secretariat, Parliament house and other areas, which have lingered so long in my memory, that I miss it even now, nearly fifty years later. In fact, when I visited Delhi to interview Indira Gandhi when she was the prime minister, she welcomed me in her office in the Parliament building. By that time, I had been promoted from the railway retiring rooms at one rupee a day to the Oberoi five star hotel where my newspaper was dishing out a few hundred rupees a day.
I have since visited Delhi many times on duty and for pleasure because I like it so much. It is quite different from Mumbai, London and Cairo but to me much more pleasant, especially the area of the secretariat, the prime minister’s suburb and Rashtrapati Bhavan where the president stays. It was built by the British government at India’s expense, of course. It was planned by architects Edwin Lutyens and Herbert Baker in the early part of the 20th century and given to Indian contractors to build. Good use was made of the vast open spaces, which were converted into delightful streets, unlike those of Mumbai and Calcutta.
The National Geographic Traveler Magazine lists it as one of its “Ultimate Cities of a Lifetime”. Another report describes it as the best Indian city to live in. Its tree-lined, wide boulevards and national institutions are unique inside and outside the country. New Delhi has few of the slum areas prevalent in other cities. And thanks to the ban on cheap and filthy petrol in favor of natural gas, it is a lot cleaner than other cities and also cleaner than it used to be a few years ago.
And whereas travelers used to complain and fret over the old airport, which for a long time was a shame, the newly built Indira Gandhi International Airport is a joy, comparatively speaking. It caters for over 35 million passengers a year, with plans to accommodate 100 million a year.
Despite the complaints of residents and some foreigners, I find the public transport fine and efficient considering the millions of people using its buses and trains including the Delhi Metro, which was built recently and is poised to expand further. Phase one alone cost $2.3 billion, with phase two likely to cost twice as much. The Delhi Railway Station, which is the main railway station in the capital, is the second busiest and one of the largest in Asia.
Almost all friends and children who accompanied me to Delhi were impressed by its architecture, monuments, roads, Humayun’s Tomb, Qutub Minar, India Gate National Monument, temples, the Delhi Durbar and endless other places that are fairly well maintained if you do not expect them to shine like their counterparts in Europe and Japan.
My stays at the Oberoi or the Sheraton took me into the midst of the finest areas of the city. Both hotels are five star outfits or more given the amount of greenery that surrounds them. The Sheraton overlooks the national park of Delhi. And it is on the eighteenth floor lounge that I used to take my breakfast complete with masala omelet and accompanying tea.
The service is among the best in the world in addition to the courtesy and willingness to help all the time, better than many such hotels in west, Japan and Taiwan. This may come as a surprise but the fact is that Indian five star hotels are fantastic, well staffed and superbly efficient and do not expect you to pay them baksheesh (tip) every time they serve you unless you want to do so. Think of other hotels and you’ll know what I mean.

• Farouk Luqman is an eminent journalist based in Jeddah.
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