A recent cab ride through a sprawling Indian metro revealed the enduring paradox of urban existence. The driver, frustrated by notorious traffic, exclaimed, "This is no city, it is a crowd." Yet, after a pause, he added, "But this city is my only hope." A migrant who found no worthwhile employment in his hometown, he saw the city as both chaos and possibility, burden and refuge.
The Dual Nature of Cities
Decades ago, Khushwant Singh described Bombay, before it became Mumbai, as "the only city" in India with enough high-rise buildings to resemble "a miniature New York." He added, "It has other things to justify its city status: it is congested, it has traffic jams at all hours of the day, it is highly polluted and many parts of it stink." Today, almost every Indian metropolis fulfills those criteria.
Architect Gerson da Cunha once observed that a city is the sum of its economic opportunities and its quality of life. Judged by that measure, few Indian metropolises offer both opportunity and a life of dignity for their citizens. The debate surfaces repeatedly on social media, comparing Indian and Western urban life: efficient civic infrastructure versus vibrant community life, cleaner air versus richer cultural life, order versus spontaneity.
Ustopia: A State of Mind
Writer Margaret Atwood perceptively observes, "Within every dystopia, there is a little utopia." She coined the word 'ustopia,' combining both words and the disparate worlds they hold. Ustopia, she wrote, "is the imagined perfect society and its opposite — because, in my view, each contains a latent version of the other." This idea extends naturally to the city. It is never merely a collection of roads, buildings and infrastructure; it is also an emotional landscape, shaped by the histories, memories and everyday lives of its inhabitants.
A city lives many lives and undergoes many rebirths. No single narrative can ever exhaust its meaning. Whether it is Singh's 'Delhi,' where the city becomes a layered chronicle of its past and present; 'City of Djinns,' where William Dalrymple explores Delhi as a palimpsest; 'Maximum City,' where Suketu Mehta reveals Mumbai as a restless creature of ambition, crime, cinema and survival; or 'City of Joy,' in which Dominique Lapierre portrays Kolkata through extraordinary resilience amid poverty — each offers a different way of seeing the city.
Personal and Paradoxical
For the historian, the city is a chronicle in stone and memory; for the sociologist, a pulsating social landscape; for the political observer, a theatre of power. Every walk on its streets becomes an act of reading for the flaneur. For the storyteller, it offers an inexhaustible crucible of characters and contexts. And for the poet, it is indeed a state of mind — an emotion, a longing, a rhythm of life. That idea found poetic expression: "Poocha jo maine rooh se, 'Yeh Dilli kya hai?' Yeh sun ke boli, 'Jism kul aalam hai, aur Dilli us ki jaan hai'" (I asked my soul: What is Delhi? She replied: The world is the body, and Delhi its life).
Ultimately, the city each of us inhabits is intensely personal. One may not feel at home in it even after years of living there, while a passing traveller may forge an instant connection. Graham Greene wrote that however large a city may be, it finally consists for each person of only "a few streets, a few houses, a few people." Remove those, and it survives only as "a pain in the memory, like a pain of an amputated leg." The city we remember, however, is rarely the one that continues to exist.
Perhaps that is the enduring paradox of the city: it belongs to everyone and yet to no one. Dalrymple has remarked that the Delhi he first encountered had become almost unrecognisable within two decades. That may well be the destiny of every city: to outgrow the stories written about it, even as it invites new ones.
