The New New Delhi

Driving out from Delhi, we pass through a building site as far as the eye can see. Delhi has been built and rebuilt over the millenia in slightly different spots by at least seven different regimes - New Delhi being the seventh, city of the British and the postwar Indian republic. But now it looks as if another is emerging, in Gurgaon, south west of the city. The road quickly widens to a 12 lane motorway, garlanded in massive construction plots, in gold-red dust where the tiny figures of workers toil. Striking, angular buildings of steel and glass: the banks and multinational corporations rearing up on either side, with neat car parks and their hectare of well-watered grass, before another set of foundations or unfinished building breathes its dust into the sky. For the next twenty miles, hoardings and jerry-built shacks scream 'PROPERTIES to BUY', 'DEVELOPERS', 'EARTHMOVING EQUIPMENT'. Adverts offer 'Royal Living' and 'Postmodern Pleasures' in apartments with pictures of ergonomic architecture resembling something out of a Star Trek set. Then every so often, the old India returns to claim the land: our driver has slowed, labouring the horn, and almost in the towering shadow of the Citibank a herd of sheep and goats cross the junction, their drovers in bright red turbans, unhurriedly herding the animals forward to a further crescendo of horns.

We accelerate again, and then, when we ask to stop to take a pee, the driver says, 'Yes, Macdonalds next left,' and drives us into a little plastic world where the bushes are tidily cropped around the car lanes to exactly the same height as they are in the Haringey Macdonalds. We order a Chicken Maharaja burger and a McTikka Aloo, and sit meekly while well-dressed Indian children play in the back garden. Above us in the corner, a large flat screen TV plays the video to Michael Jackson's 'Black and White', in which a giant white baby sits atop the globe, looking playful and tender.