From London with love

The other day I wrote about a sign on a construction site in Delhi four years ago which stated “Construction in progress. Please be patient with delays for a better tomorrow.” At the time I described the speed of social change as a “slow crawl”, but landing in an unrecognisable international airport in Delhi this morning I was shocked to see how fast the landscape has changed, in this wealthy corner of Delhi at least. Transformed from the dirty floors and rickety baggage carousels of the airport I remember, Indira Gandhi International is now all marble and gleaming glass, and the huddled groups of men, women and children begging and hawking as you pass into the heat of the Indian capital have either disappeared or moved on.

In Delhi, we, that is Catriona from Find Your Feet, Natalie from The Guardian and myself, met Savitri, Find Your Feet’s India country manager, before our onward flight to Varanasi. Varanasi airport belongs to an entirely different era to Delhi’s. While we wait for our baggage, a power cut plunges us into darkness and brings the carousel to a juddering halt. As we leave the airport it is immediately clear that we have travelled further than we thought on our short internal flight. The difference is not just architectural, it is also cultural. The Delhi we glimpsed has become remarkably Anglophone, from signs to magazines, indeed even to the eager market research that we had thrust upon us to review the sparkling new airport. In Varanasi, Hindi, Urdu and local dialects remain dominant. Our hotel menu is an exception to that rule, and offers a glimpse of a culinary view of the British from an Indian point of view. The “Continental menu” includes a dish entitled “From London with love”. It is fish & chips.