I have no time for people who say Delhi is a boring, smoked out city: William Dalrymple

The large hall is filled beyond capacity. People have squeezed through the passages and are sitting on the steps and the floor below the stage. Others stand patiently at the rear. Only a solitary seat remains unoccupied, the one reserved for the star speaker on the stage.
Applause rings through the hall as he arrives, five minutes late for the show.But as he begins to speak at the Times Litfest on Saturday, historian and travel writer William Dalrymple shows exactly why he enjoys star status in India’s literary circles.
“I have no time for people who say Delhi is a boring, smoked out city. Go out, take a Metro, there’s no city like it,” he says, adding that the city’s historical legacy is comparable only to great urban centres such as Cairo and Damascus.
Like a trained raconteur, Dalrymple describes his travels in delightful detail — the screening of Bond flick Dr No at a Uighur town in Maoist China, the immigrant kabab sellers lined up in Karachi and sitting in the exact order as they did at Delhi’s Jama Masjid and the poignant homelessness of displaced Delhi author Ahmed Ali who declares in Karachi that he had no country to call his own.
“People are at the heart of great travel writing. It must engage each one of your senses including the feeling of dust in your toes,” he says.
Dalrymple is in conversation with fellow expat writer and journalist Sam Miller, who himself has several notable works to his credit including a book on Delhi. But in the presence of the star, Miller is but an interesting sideshow.