ABSTRACT
Since the late 1990s I have keep returning and staying in New Delhi. Since that time, many places I have visited or passed by have changed or been demolished; new sites have been built and impacted on the ongoing transformation of urban India in the context of neo-liberalization; some sites have done so more drastically than others.1 Luxury townships at the outskirts of Delhi’s National Capital Region (NCR) have come up, as well as a number of shopping malls, golf courses, gated communities and multi-storey business buildings mushroom across the city. New Delhi has changed in the light of mega-events, such as the Asian Games of 1982 or the upcoming Commonwealth Games of 2010. But by no means are such events the sole force of urban transformation. A megacity and national capital such as New Delhi must constantly attract capital and attention of all kinds in order to be part of the network of global cities and regimes of visibility. Advertisements are a crucial ‘aesthetic interface of postcolonial capitalism’ (Mazzarella, 2003: 4) and globalizing consumerism of the new cities from the ‘globalising South’as they compete for international recognition and investment (e.g. real estate development, retail sector, business product outsourcing).2
