“The elegant white columns are now covered with hoardings”, journalist-author Sam Miller and told an adoring crowd at Delhi’s Oxford Book Store today, “But as anyone who has got lost in Connaught Place will tell you, the sense of circularity remains.”

Miller could well have been describing his book Delhi: Adventures in a Megacity. The book’s elegant premise — walking in expanding circles through Delhi — is swiftly belied by the “shit squirters”, angry pigs and gruesome abattoirs. But the recurring warmth, quirkiness and endurance of theDilliwallahs who populate this megacity, provide the reader with a “sense of circularity” that remains till the very end.

Connaught Place was both venue and subject of Miller’s talk. Prior to that, Miller had spent a fog-covered morning taking a group of Delhi enthusiasts on a short walk around CP.

The talk itself alternated between Miller reading excerpts from his book and a slide presentation of the many photographs he has collected on his wanderings. Some of the visuals yielded knowing gasps from those in the audience who had read Adventures in a Megacity, delighted at the tit bits of insider information.

One delightful photograph was of a blurry Jantar Mantar, the iconic “stairway to heaven”. Miller asked his audience to focus on the two barely visible lines on the ground. These are railway tracks, he said, built for material to travel from Old Delhi to the still-being-built New Delhi. Other visuals — an aerial view of CP being built, or a 19th Century map of Delhi —made Miller’s point clear to everyone, that: “in just 80 years, Connaught Place moved from being the south-most point of the city to now, virtually the northern tip”.

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