The capital of India has become the capital of its collective ambition--in fashion, business, government, and more.

Delhi has been described as an “unlovable city.”

That’s nonsense, but one can see how the claim arose. India’s capital, so the canard goes, is a city of migrants and refugees from all corners of India whose ancestries (and loyalties) are elsewhere, and who still regard Delhi as a temporary home. Every cabdriver here can enumerate the charms of his far-off birthplace, even if he hasn’t been back in decades. But few wax rhapsodic about Delhi. No single community may call the city its own, nor can any group be said to belong here. “People don’t come because they necessarily love the city,” says my friend Ashok Malik, a columnist for India’s Pioneer newspaper. “Primarily they come to make a name for themselves.”

Mumbai has Bollywood and the financial markets, Kolkata its intellectual life, Varanasi the holy Ganges. But what, besides ambition, is Delhi really about?Once the sole domain of government bureaucrats and babus (clerks), it’s now also a global hub for fashion, media, business, technology, and manufacturing as well. With the dozens of languages, ethnicities, and agendas that coexist here, Delhi is impossible to pin down. Even the origins of its name are indeterminate. One possible source is the Persian dehleez, or “threshold”—an apt symbol for a town full of arrivistes. Travelers, too, have seen Delhi as a doorway to be passed through, quickly, en route to more exotic points: Jaipur, Goa, the Taj Mahal. For visitors and residents alike, Delhi was what happened while you were making other plans

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