Delhi to name trees to quell clamor for honors

Thinking about infrastructure in the wake of today's Delhi Metro piece, I ran across an interesting item in the Indian Express.  It turns out, Delhi has run out of roads to christen with the names of politicians and historical figures, so the government has turned to the trees.  

In what I called a city of self-professed VIPs (one reader said I underestimated: It's VVIPs), the names of roads aren't very useful for getting around — nine times out of ten if you ask for a major thoroughfare, say Aurobindo Marg, nobody will know what you're talking about — but apparently the name game is essential for political clout.  You've got Aurobindo (props to the Bengali freedom fighter / guru), Kamal Ataturk (first president of Turkey), Akbar Road (Delhi's third Mughal emperor), Mahatma Gandhi Marg (goes without saying), Josip Broz Tito Marg (Yugoslav revolutionary), and the list goes on and on.

As the Indian Express puts it rather cleverly:

If there is one place where Kamal Ataturk turns right to Kautilya, and Krishna Menon and Kamraj still find a meeting point, and Firoz Shah runs into Ashoka, it is Delhi. Its streets, named after leaders of all kinds of lost kingdoms and modern politicians, Latin American revolutionaries, Russian novelists and sundry local heroes, are like an entertaining jigsaw puzzle where history and geography collapse in the most bizarre fashion. 

Never mind that the street signs (if they exist) are too small to read until after you've missed your turn. Never mind that the only directional guides all read "India Gate" with an arrow pointing vaguely toward the center of the city, the next sign nowhere in sight for the next five miles, and several turns, later.  Never mind that the road changes names randomly several times over that five miles.  And never mind that if you stop and ask for directions, the names of roads will in no way feature in the answer you receive.  The important thing is:

Delhi has run out of roads to name. But names keep pouring in from various parts of the state and even across the country at the State Naming Authority, and, the Express writes "apparently, the naming must go on."  To solve the problem, the government has ask the Delhi Development Authority to allow it to name the trees in the Millennium Park after some very important people.  You know you're a Delhiwallah if your first thought was "How do I get on that list?"

It makes me think of a brief portrait of this city that I wrote for a travel mag a few years back….

The bastard child of a half-dozen invasions and the seat of power for Hindu, Mughal and British empires, today Delhi is a great, sprawling metropolis of wide, treelined avenues and narrow medieval bylanes, palatial mansions and jerry-built polystyrene shacks. Crowded, noisy, polluted and hot-tempered, it is a difficult place for the outsider to love. But the secret to surviving India's capital is the same as the secret to surviving India: Take the heat, filth, poverty and the constant scrum in moderation—and when they get to you, blow up or break down and then let it go. If you're able to do that, Delhi's rich history and surprising modern charms can make it much more than the launchpoint for a tour through Rajasthan.

Invaded, conquered, abandoned and invaded again, Delhi was the capital of many kingdoms and several ancient empires—including the opulent realm of the Pandavas of the Hindu epic Mahabharata–before it became the capital of modern India. But for the purposes of the modern-day visitor it is sufficent to know that three seminal events shaped the city's character and geography—Muslim conquest, British colonization, and the influx of refugees following the partition of the subcontinent into independent India and Pakistan in 1947.

The Muslim conquest of Delhi–first by the Afghan Mehmood of Ghazni in 1192 and later by the Uzbek Babur in 1526—brought the city its most elegant (surviving) monuments, much of its non-vegetarian cuisine, and a syncretic culture that combines the Central Asian preoccupations with honor and machismo and Hinduism's spiritual tolerance and sensuality. The Red Fort, the Jama Masjid, Humayun's Tomb and the Qutub Minar—without question Delhi's most rewarding historical sites, and not to be missed—are all products of India's Muslim rulers. And much of present-day Old Delhi—once the walled city of Shahjehanabad, built by the same Mughal emperor who built the Taj Mahal—has the look and feel of an Afghan or Uzbek bazaar, spitted goat grilling over coals or bubbling away in cauldrons and skull-capped men and veiled women kneeling in shopfronts to offer namaz. Crowded, dirty and noisy, the old city can be intimidating. But in limited doses (especially early in the morning), its narrow, winding lanes offer the traveler an incredible experience of immersion in India's daily life that cannot be duplicated anyplace else.

Colonization by the British, who moved their capital here from Kolkata in 1911, brought the city its wide roads and bureaucratic edifices—exemplified by Rashtrapati Bhavan (or President's House), which was formerly the viceroy's palace, the domed Secretariat Buildings and Sansad Bhavan (Parliament House). Britain's architectural contributions are of little interest to most foreign tourists. But Delhi owes much of its charm (and some of its aggravations) to the Brits' transformation of the city, which created the Indian Babu (a sort of uberbureaucrat) and the English-speaking elite. Perhaps inevitably, a culture of entitlement, influence-peddling and nepotism evolved that today seeps as far down as the velvet rope guarding the city's posh nightclubs—where everybody claims his cousin, uncle or godfather is a member of parliament, if not the prime minister himself. If Mumbai, like New York, is a city where you go to reinvent yourself, Delhi is a city where you work your connections. The largest employer, the posh set jokes, is an outfit called IDB. In Daddy's Business.