They say life’s what happens when you’re busy making other plans. But sometimes in New York, life is what happens when you’re waiting for a table.” So claims Carrie Bradshaw on Sex and the City, and we believe her. After all, isn’t that exactly the ancient allure of a big city, the anything-can-happen encounters with the new and strange?

Cities are supposedly where strangers meet. They are the crucibles of citizenship, the locations where we negotiate terms of common living. Packed in together, we bump up against people whose backgrounds are utterly alien. They are places where origins are less burdensome, where unexpected kinds of sociability can occur (though they can also be sites of intolerance and persecution). But if a city is the theatre for the human drama of citizenship, it’s notoriously hard to catch a viewing in India, with our woeful lack of a visible public culture. The simplest shared pleasures are the hardest to come by in our cities. In fact, just going to an IPL match is a revelatory experience in New Delhi, because you realise how starved we are for such venues of public conviviality. There’s a palpable sense of fun at the match. Of being out having a tremendously good time with friends and family, eyeballing strangers, eating and drinking, soaking in the connection and the separation that urban crowds offer.

Delhi is a sprawl of black-gated, fortified enclaves (or dense warrens of crumbling housing), with hardly any common spaces. Our roads are like conveyor belts for furiously moving specks of traffic to ring around, fly over or pass under. It’s a Point A to Point B city without a downtown, or a meaningful street life. If indigenous town planning with its chowks and bazaars literally made space for the thrumming patchwork of human energy, for conversation and exchange, “modern” urban planning in India is hopelessly haunted by its colonial past of garrisons and civil lines. Our cities are designed to minimise contact with the other, deny the publicness of public space. As anthropologist Teresa Caldeira has written about Sao Paulo, invoking urban fear is a way of separating the affluent and the poor, the beautiful and the damned — so that work, leisure and living are conducted in sealed spaces. We experience the city in privatised bubbles, we seek our pleasures among people like us.

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