by Priya Malhotra
When I went to Singapore last month, I found myself staring at the streets with a kind of baffled fascination. They were so clean that they seemed almost untouched by human life. There were no half-torn love letters plastered to the pavement by some earlier rain, no crumpled receipt skittering in the wind, no faint evidence of a snack eaten in haste, no sign that anyone had ever dropped anything, spilled anything, lost anything, longed for anything in public. There was not even the small, almost ridiculous debris of ordinary life: a noodle slipped from someone’s mouth in a rush, a tissue escaping a handbag, a leaflet stepped into the ground by hundreds of indifferent feet. Everything looked polished, intact, strangely unsullied. It was not only that the city seemed clean. It seemed as though no one had ever really been there, as though all traces had been erased as soon as they were made. Everywhere one stepped, it felt like stepping into something new and traceless, a place from which the usual human residue of living had been meticulously removed. The city seemed not merely clean but continuously renewed, as if it had discovered a way to remain permanently youthful. Nothing appeared frayed. Nothing appeared to have endured.
I could see, very clearly, why this was appealing. I am not immune to beauty, ease, or order. On the contrary, I often hunger for them. There was pleasure in walking through a city that did not look battered by use, neglect, weather, or time. There was relief in not having to brace oneself against visual and sensory assault. Singapore was quiet, elegant, efficient, composed. It looked like a place that had mastered itself.
And yet I felt, beneath my admiration, a curious distance that surprised me.
There are, on paper, many reasons I ought to prefer Singapore to Delhi, where I currently reside. Singapore is cleaner, calmer, greener, more efficient, more orderly, more breathable. It does not assault the nervous system in the way Delhi so often can. Its roads move with a discipline that, to a Delhite, can seem almost miraculous. Its public spaces are polished, its surfaces cared for, its rhythms as predictable as a machine. Singapore presents itself as a city that has thought things through.
Delhi, by contrast, often seems like a city that has thought nothing through and yet somehow keeps going. It is loud, polluted, unruly, crowded, exasperating. It can feel like an affront to reason. Traffic behaves as if governed by anarchy rather than law. The air, for months at a stretch, is hardly fit to breathe.
Splendour exists everywhere in Delhi, though not always evenly tended. Some monuments are lovingly preserved while others seem to survive on endurance alone, their grandeur still visible beneath neglect. One finds, too, small museums and lesser-known spaces containing treasures of startling beauty that are barely displayed, stored, or safeguarded as they ought to be, as though the city has not fully reckoned with the richness of what it possesses.
Even so, Delhi at its best can be breathtaking: its domes, ruins, avenues, gardens, and old stones carry a depth and atmosphere that make its magnificence feel not merely visible, but historically saturated. In Delhi, beauty is seldom sealed off from the rest of life; it is just as likely to stand amid traffic fumes, administrative neglect, and the slow crumbling of what should have been better protected. On top of that, few things are simple and smooth in Delhi they are in Singapore. Even pleasure often comes attached to inconvenience, delay, noise, human unpredictability.
And yet I feel more drawn to Delhi.
This is not entirely rational, and perhaps that is precisely the point. We flatter ourselves when we imagine that our deepest attachments are arrived at through reason. Reason has its place. It helps us compare systems, protect our health, minimize suffering, recognize what functions better. It explains why a city like Singapore can inspire admiration so quickly and so widely. One does not need to squint to appreciate it. Its virtues are visible, legible, measurable. It makes sense.
But what makes sense is not always what seizes the heart. Human beings do not live by logic alone, nor do they love by it. We are not machines optimizing for efficiency. We are creatures of memory, temperament, texture, contradiction, longing, scent, rhythm, and accident. We are moved by things we cannot entirely defend. Often what we can justify and what we can love occupy distinct realms that may not overlap.
This is not a criticism of Singapore. In some moods, I find it deeply appealing. There is relief, ease and comfort in it, and none of those can be underrated. To enter a city that seems not to be at war with its own infrastructure, its own public realm, its own citizens’ lungs, is no small feat. There is something deeply appealing about competence on that scale. A city that works with such grace and efficiency can feel almost soft, especially to those of us accustomed to cities that are not.
Singapore offers what so many cities do not: the ease of competence, the steadiness of systems, the absence of needless friction.
And yet there are moments when that very coherence leaves me faintly untouched.
Not because it is lacking in life. Singapore is far too sophisticated and culturally rich to be dismissed in some glib manner. Nor because order is inherently soulless; that, too, would be a lazy thought. Order can be beautiful. It can create the conditions for flourishing. It can protect dignity. There is nothing noble about bad governance, toxic air, or civic indifference. Disorder is not automatically depth. Mess is not synonymous with soul.
And yet soul does not always announce itself in the same way as order. It often arrives through density, friction, excess, spontaneity, emotional overinvestment, the sense that life is spilling out of its allotted containers. Delhi, for all its exhaustion, has this quality. It does not feel preserved. It feels inhabited. It bears the marks of use, time, damage, improvisation, survival.
Part of this, I suspect, has to do with history. Delhi carries its age visibly. It has layers. Dynasties, empires, ruins, partitions, ambitions, collapses, afterlives: they do not sit politely in museums but leak into the city’s atmosphere. Delhi has been made and unmade so many times that one feels, moving through it, not just the present tense of a city but the sediment of other eras pressing upward through it. The city is never only itself. It is always also what it has been. That layering gives it depth even when it does not give it grace.
Singapore, for all its sophistication and accomplishment, can seem to present itself in a more curated register. It is not without history, of course, but history there does not press upon the senses in quite the same way. It does not hang in the air, jut out of the ground, interrupt the eye at every turn. It feels more edited, more managed, more intent on its own sleek legibility. Delhi is not like that. Delhi does not perform coherence. It sprawls, remembers, sheds, accumulates. It does not seem concerned with appearing youthful. It has aged in public.
Perhaps that is part of the contradiction: the things that make a place difficult are not always separate from the things that make it vivid.
There are places that impress us, and places that claim a deeper allegiance. The two are not always the same. One can admire a city for its intelligence, foresight, beauty, and grace, while remaining emotionally tethered to a city that is more compromised, more maddening, less coherent. We do this not only with places, but with people. Some people are obviously good for us. They are reasonable, dependable, measured, kind. Others are harder, stranger, more difficult to explain, and yet they stir parts of us that the reasonable ones never quite reach. We know, in theory, what should appeal. But our inner life is not entirely obedient to theory.
Delhi offers not comfort but richness. It is visibly unfinished, unequal, striving, frayed, grandiose, wounded, alive. It contains so many Indias at once that one is constantly being reminded of the absurdity of trying to reduce it to a single essence. It is historical and hurried, brutal and lyrical, vulgar and sublime within the span of a single street. Its sensory register is wide. Its emotional register is wider. One can hate it at noon and feel fiercely attached to it by dusk.
That volatility is not, in itself, a virtue. But it may be closer to the way many of us actually experience life. We are not tidy within ourselves. Why should the places that move us most be tidy either?
Singapore, by comparison, can feel like a city one respects from slightly outside oneself. Delhi feels like a city one inhabits from within, even while resisting it.
I do not mean that Delhi is therefore “better.” Better for whom? Better by what measure? That is precisely the trap. Not everything that matters can be ranked according to external criteria. Rational judgment can tell us what is better run, more “civilized” in certain civic respects, more conducive to ease, health, and order. But it cannot fully explain attachment. It cannot account for why one landscape enters the bloodstream while another remains, however beautifully, at the level of admiration.
This is not to reject the rational in favor of the irrational. That would be too easy, and false. We live between them. We need the rational. We need standards, discernment, structure, proportion. Rationality helps us assess what works, what is safer, what is fairer, what is more conducive to human well-being. It keeps us from mistaking mere mood for truth or romanticizing what may in fact be harmful. But however much we like to think of ourselves as rational, we are not ruled by reason alone. Instinct, longing, aversion, memory, atmosphere, desire: these exert enormous force. They shape attachment before argument has a chance to catch up. They are not always wise, but they are powerful, and they are part of what makes us human.
And perhaps that is true of more than cities. Perhaps much of life is lived in this uneasy space between what we can defend and what we cannot help desiring, between what is evidently admirable and what feels mysteriously, stubbornly our own. We are forever trying to bring these realms into alignment, to make our loves answer to reason and our reason make room for love.
Sometimes they converge. Sometimes they do not.
Ultimately, what I carried back from Singapore was not a preference, exactly, but a sharper awareness of how often admiration and attachment don’t always overlap.
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