India, Aug. 10 -- "To the earth-worn, suffering man, Rome is the city of visible history, where the past of the whole world seems moving in funeral procession with strange ancestral images and trophies gathered from afar." George Eliot could have easily written the above about Delhi. A capital for many regimes in history, Delhi is a city of monuments, each a trophy of its era. It is also a city of migrants, each wave adding its colour to the city's landscape - some living in posh bungalows and upscale colonies and others cheek by jowl in tenements that dot urban villages.

It is in the jostling between these two populations - one inert (the city's monuments) and the other human - that Delhi grows and groans. HT reported on August 10 on ho...