Delhi

“Delhi, as we were taught in school, has an ‘extreme climate'. And if Delhi is in every other aspect also a city of extremes, it is the sharp and sudden variations in temperature which explain its personality… Like all of northern India, Delhi has four distinct seasons: a brief vasant or spring, a long, sweltering summer, an erratic and moody monsoon, and a winter that ranges from chill to balmy... Delhi in the springtime boasts blue skies and green lawns, and an incredible profusion of flowers: roses, lilies, tulips, gladioli, larkspur. In the fields and villages that surround Delhi, acres and acres of bright mustard fields announce the spring… June in Delhi illustrates that a Delhiwala, like a cockroach, can survive anything, for such are the vicissitudes of weather… all too soon, the cycle of the seasons begins again, as the city changes and observes change itself. In every change there are always constants...what is Delhi's constants? There is the river, the Yamuna, roiling between Delhi and Nida, a mess of pollutants and sewage, dissatisfied, degraded, depressed. The river flows with it all, absorbing the best and the worst of the strange city that it nurtures.”