India, Oct. 17 -- The strict security measures, rolled out in the national capital in response to recent protests, served as a refresher on the city's geography. Connecting roads and lanes, landmark buildings, "round-abouts", all assumed a new character for the police and protestors alike. It is this New Delhi that comes alive in historian and author Swapna Liddle's Connaught Place and the Making of New Delhi. The book traces the national capital's origins as a bureaucratic enclave meant to house the Raj after it decided to shift out of Calcutta following the disastrous partition of Bengal. The conurbation we see today, Liddle writes, would perhaps never have happened if those who saw Delhi little other than a "lifeless backwater of the Punjab province" prevailed in the pre-shift discussions. Iconic buildings and what they started out as, feuding architects, and many such tales of New Delhi then and now will make the reader understand the city better....