Commonwealth Games 2010: Delhi prays for another miracle
The run-up to the Commonwealth Games may not have been Delhi's finest hour, but tourists to the city will be astonished at the pace of change, says Stephen McClarence.
Commonwealth Games 2010: Delhi prays for a miracle
Devender Khanna is telling me about the impact of the Commonwealth Games on Delhi when he breaks off. "Excuse me, I will just do my prayer," he says. "You want some tea? I'll give you Indian tea that you would not get for £100."
He turns to the shelf at the back of his stationery store in Connaught Place, Delhi's great coliseum of commerce, picks up a handful of marigolds and scatters them on a small shrine next to a display of scissors.
It's like a little weather house, with models of Hindu gods gazing beyond racks of staplers and coloured pencils to the customers at the shop's long counters.
"I am asking for blessings that my day should pass cordially and that I should not harm anybody," Devender explains as the £100 tea arrives and he offers me a Bourbon cream biscuit.
Plenty of other people in Delhi have been praying over the past few weeks, as preparations for the Commonwealth Games – due to open on Sunday – have lurched from crisis to crisis. A heavy monsoon has delayed the completion of some of the stadiums and, amid allegations of corruption, there have been floods, an outbreak of dengue fever, and concerns over safety and security. Tension increased when a shooting at the city's Jama Masjid mosque resulted in injuries to two Taiwanese film-makers, prompting Kumari Selja, the minister for tourism, to appeal to tourists not to panic. Delhi newspapers now write about "The Common Woe Games".
It was never meant to be like this. India initially saw the Games as a chance to parade its ever-growing political and economic clout. They would do for its image what the World Cup did for South Africa's.
Week by week, however, a fiesta has become a fiasco and commentators have questioned whether the billions of rupees spent on the Games might have been better spent helping the 830 million Indians who live on less than 30p a day.
Nor has the international tourist interest in the Games been anything like expected. "Honestly speaking, I haven't met a single foreign tourist who has shown interest in the Games," one Delhi travel agent told me. His words were echoed by Dr Shailesh Tripathi, president of the government-approved Tourist Guide Association.
"Our expectations were very high," he said. "But it's a very big flop-show. Our expectation was 10 times more tourists. Maybe after the Games they will come. Sometimes in India, a miracle happens."
Back in his stationery store, Devender is confident about that miracle. Races against time hold no fears for Indians. "We can't call ourselves lethargic," he says. "But we basically do things at the last moment."
True enough. Outside the store, along Connaught Place's concentric colonnades, shoppers dodge piles of sand and rubble as renovation work steadily continues. Squatting labourers chip away at pavements and pillars with lumps of rock – an almost Stone Age scene at odds with the Rolex and Louis Philippe outlets around it.
But the renovation is working. Connaught Place has been freshly painted and, after visiting Delhi regularly for the past 15 years, I've never seen the colonnades looking so spruce, so Polo-mint white. New polished-granite piazzas have been created. Somehow the atmosphere of hassle that can deter visitors has been diluted.
It's just one instance of the positive legacy the Games will bequeath to tourists. Others are everywhere. Delhi railway station has a smart new frontage and a sleek facia has been grafted onto the tatty row of small shops directly opposite. Paharganj, haunt of backpackers, and home of the Durga Anodizers shop and Dwinkle Opticals, looks brighter than in recent years. And the arrivals area of the new £2 billion international airport, opened in July, has astonished visitors.
"I'd say it's the cleanest, most open, airy air terminal I've ever seen anywhere," said Dr Brian Tweedale, who was supervising a party of journalism students from Sheffield Hallam University, here to cover the Games. "To arrive into it gives you the idea that you're in the 21st century."
The airport, India's biggest public building, will soon be connected directly with central Delhi by the new, ever-expanding Metro system, which I sampled after a whistle-stop tour of recent improvements. I took a car and driver from the Ambassador Hotel, a welcoming colonial building recently rebranded as "Vivanta by Taj – Ambassador, New Delhi". It is handily placed for Lodi Gardens, Delhi's most pleasant park, and Khan Market, haunt of expats and rich Indians, with shops that look ever plusher with their designer sunglasses and nail-extension services.
We cruised along the elegant tree-lined avenues of South Delhi, built by George V as an antidote to the medieval mayhem of Old Delhi. "Raj times," mused my driver, Naresh Kumar. "Much greenery, wide roads, lovely bungalows…" At the tail end of the monsoon ("English weather", Indians call it), the greenery looked even more luxuriant than usual, and, on a more practical level, many of the ankle-threatening pavements had been repaired. Musicians in Ruritanian uniform dozed on a roundabout, heads resting on trumpets and drums, before setting off to blast their raucous way through someone's wedding.
We drove freely, but, for the next fortnight only, special traffic lanes will be reserved for Commonwealth Games vehicles. Even so, the roads will be less busy; schools, colleges and many offices are having a holiday and many residents are reported to be fleeing the city until it's all over. Hawkers are being controversially cleared for those two weeks, with slums bulldozed or hidden by hoardings.
We drove up the main highway to the Red Fort, past trundling bullock carts and a van advertising Panicker's Travel (India) Ltd. The familiar car park outside the fort has been attractively returned to the landscaped lawns of 20 years ago. Some of this may be airbrushing, but at least the Games have been the catalyst for discreet and much-needed urban regeneration.
Naresh dropped me off at Connaught Place, hub of the Metro, the city's biggest and arguably most successful structural project since New Delhi was built last century. It will surprise anyone who hasn't been here for a decade. Its 120-mile network criss-crosses the city, sometimes underground, sometimes over, always clean, swishly smooth, fast and efficient, its carriages calm, no matter how crowded.
It's a middle-class way to travel and there's no more middle-class destination than Gurgaon, down at the end of the Yellow Line. Gurgaon has grown from a dusty village to a metropolis of high-rise apartments and shopping malls where Delhi-ites worship at the shrine of consumerism. The Ambience Mall, a young graduate proudly tells me, is one kilometre long.
On the Metro, the carriages include laptop-charging sockets and strict instructions to passengers. "Prohibited," says a sign at the entrance, "manure of any kind; any decayed animal or vegetable matter; human skeletons, ashes and parts of human body".
I was frisked by guards before buying a ticket and my bag was X-rayed. The journey was punctuated by, "Please mind the gap" and "Please stand clear of the doors" announcements, and the train emerged from a tunnel onto a flyover with a fine view of the celebrated Qutb Minar minaret thrusting over the treetops. Gurgaon loomed in the distance, but I had to get back to the airport for my flight home.
The new international terminal, approached on a sweeping flyover, has a wonderful sense of space and style. The old days of sitting in a dingy departure lounge under that uniquely Indian sort of sallow lighting have gone. There's a food court, a branch of W H Smith, an Early Learning Centre and a quiet, relaxed air rarely found in Indian public places. A gigantic Buddha's head dominates the main departures hall (which is carpeted) and a statue of Gandhi sits cross-legged near a Versace shop. Add irony to taste.
It's a glimpse of the new India the Commonwealth Games were planned to promote. And if there are more hiccups, Devender Khanna, in his stationery store, could perhaps be drafted in.
After my £100 tea, he tells me about his family and a single sentence rings out: "One of my daughters studied Disaster Management."
