City, fear and desire: New Dehli

This emergent Delhi, its population having shot up at least 20% to over 16 million in the last decade, is hard to grasp. It's not walkable in the way that Calcutta is: cars, which are increasingly dominant, allow the city to be seen as "a strobe-lit succession of unrelated glimpses". The opulence of new compounds is so strange it requires descriptive language straight out of science fiction: a building is likened to "two space stations", one of which "floats free of the earth".