Few things in the long and colorful history of Delhi

 It was not for nothing that the outstanding 18th century Urdu poet, Mir, Taqi Mir, eloquently spoke of Delhi as `the chosen city and the abode of the world select’. But, ironically, he was using the past tense when he mournfully sang of ik aalam mein intkhab and this, in some strange way, highlights another quality of Delhi which must be reckoned among its compelling claims to fame.   

The glory, splendor and excellence, the passing of which Mir moaned, were regained soon enough only to be successively lost and regained again and again. This gives Delhi the Phoenix like capacity to rise from its ashes and ruins, renewing and invigorating itself after every trauma; it thus makes the city an appropriate symbol of India’s indestructibility and agelessness.

Some seventy years after Mir, Delhi underwent yet another of its periodic ravages –what the British call the Mutiny and nationalist India the First War of independence. The last Mughal king, Bahadur Shah Zafar, was formally deposed and banished to Rangoon and his sons murdered in cold blood. But this time Zauq, the poet laureate, refused to flee.

Few things in the long and colorful history of Delhi are so striking as the manner in which this city has changed and grown during the last 40 years and has dramatically transformed itself from a cold and aloof imperial Center into a live, warm and dynamic capital of a free nation. In much more than purely physical and constitutional sense of the term, it has become the heart of the Indian republic.

Change and progress have come to other cities and towns and, indeed, to the countryside of India, too. Nor has all the transformation of Delhi during the last four decades been without blemish and flaw. But the pint is that what has happened elsewhere in a trickle has assumed in Delhi the proportions of a torrent.