INTRODUCTION :

On first inpressions, Delhi, with its jam-packed streets, tower blocks and temples, forts, mosques and colonial mansions, can be disorienting and fascinating. It certainly takes a while to find your feet, as you attempt to weave a path through buses, trucks, nuppy modern cars, mopeds, rickshaws, cows, bullock carts, hand-pulled trolleys and the occasional elephant being ridden along with the flow of traffic.

Delhi becomes more manageable as you start to appreciate that geographically as well as historically it consist of several distinct cities if anything, more than the Seven Cities of tradition. The hub of the metropolis is Central New Delhi, an orderly plan of wide roads lined with sturdy colonial buildings which was established soon after the imperial capital of British India moved here in 1911. Many of the city's hotels are here, concentrated amid the columned facades of Connaught Place, and just north of Old Delhi, Shah Jahan's seventeenth-century Capital (shajahanabad), lies 2 km or so further north. This is Delhi at its most intessentially Indian, where the traditional lifestyle of its predominantly Muslim population has changed little over two hundred years. A visit to Old Delhi's mighty Red Fort and Jami Masjid, India's largest mosque combined with the old city's bazaars.

The other five of Delhi's ex-capitals, further south, are today all but deserted, standing as impressive reminders of long-vanished dynasties. Among them you will find the towering free-standing column erected by Qutub-ud-din Aibak, the Qutub Minar and Purana Quila, Humayun's Tomb, and the major monument of the great Moghul period is Lal Qila, the "Red Fort". in Old Delhi.