To Delhi, with love

Fiona Caulfield's travel guide to Delhi is as much for Delhiites as it is for visitors to the city.

Time is the ultimate luxury," Fiona Caulfield declares with a sweep of her hand, an arch of the brows and a jaunty nod of her head. We're discussing her book, Love Delhi (which launched with a gala party on Thursday), talking about why a volume subtitled "A Handbook for the Luxury Vagabond" should list not just the chic and expensive places in and around Delhi, but also places like Aap ki Pasand, where you can have a cup of tea for Rs 50, or Prakriti, the garden boutique at Triveni, where you can buy terracotta birds for Rs 45-150. Caulfield's defence: "I was looking for places, experiences that would make you fall in love with the city."

"Love" is the operative word here "" it is the name of Caulfield's imprint, "Love Travel Guides", under which she has written-published Love Bangalore, Love Mumbai and, now, Love Delhi, with "Love Chennai", "Love Kolkata", "Love Kathmandu", "Love Goa" and around 15 others in the works.

As Caulfield confesses in her website, these are all "highly personal guides to the cities of the so-called emerging world, for lovers of travel and authentic experiences".

"Love" is also evident in the book's production. Encased in a "luxury edition" hot pink silk pouch (it was red for Bangalore and blue for Mumbai), the book cover, developed with Delhi-based fashion designer Sonam Dubal, depicts a map of India printed on traditional Tibetan raw silk called "burrey", which is hand-woven in south Assam.

The book is printed on handmade, eco-friendly, non-bleached paper and even the bookmark has been handcrafted in Bangalore by a designer-friend, Chandrashekhar. It's clearly a labour of love "" but for the proofing errors.

Essentially, Love Delhi is a series of lists of stores, eateries, and public spaces broken up into sections named "Delicious" (Dining: Eating & Drinking), "Fabulous" (Shopping: Hunting & Gathering), "Gorgeous" (Pampering: Looking Good & Feeling Good), and the like, with short write-ups containing interesting tid-bits of information on each.

It's, in Caulfield's words, "boutique, electric, discerning", the guiding principle behind the compilation being "love" and places that are "very Delhi". (So malls go right out because "they give you the feeling that you could be anywhere in the world".)

For example, the shopping section mentions the usual suspects "" The Imperial Hotel Boutique and The Box at the Park Hotel, but it also includes Rohit Kaicker, who runs Gallery 29 in Sunder Nagar market where you can buy genuine Indian miniature paintings; Thakalis, the gallery Asha Chopra runs from her home in Vasant Vihar where she peddles Thangkas; and Gulabsingh Johrimal, the almost 200-year-old attar shop in Chandni Chowk.

"The target group," Caulfield explains, lapsing into the jargon of the high-powered marketing consultant she used to be, advising firms like IBM, Nike, British Airways about future strategies, before she chucked it all up to become a travel-book writer and publisher, "I had in mind when I started, was the Western traveller to the non-Western world. The Western traveller to India is no longer the backpacker or the eccentric aristocrat of the '50s and '60s. Increasingly, and this is something happening to other developing tourism destinations as well, it's someone who comes to Delhi for a day or two for a seminar before flying to Bangalore for some official meetings and then, taking a day or two off to holiday. This book's for the time poor-resource rich traveller who wants to capture the essence of a city in the little time he's got."

Caulfield tells of a lady who wrote to her after coming upon her book on Mumbai, recounting her experience of asking the staff of the five-star she was staying about shops. "They directed her to Gucci, Chanel "" as if she'd come to India for that."

It was a similar experience, when Caulfield, on a brief stopover at Kolkata and staying at The Oberoi Grand, had failed to get the staff to direct her to an authentic Bengali food restaurant that led to her to think of writing a travel guide that offered much more than Lonely Planet.

Indeed, if Caulfield, a self-confessed "travel junkie", had any models in mind, they were far more venerable ""the Baedekers, the Murrays Handbooks and the Moleskin Diaries (she has a copy of the 1898 edition of Murray's Handbook, and was thrilled to find an 1893 copy at R S Books in Delhi).

"I am paying homage to all the travel guides here," she says pointing to the Baskerville font, the tasteful but small illustrations in black and red, the pouch on the back cover to stuff papers in, the spaces between columns for people to write notes and the black elastic to keep everything together "" all elements taken from these iconic guides.

If there's any other, more modern publication Caulfield had in mind, it was probably the guide book on silent places in New York. "It lists all the gardens, the cloisters, the art galleries, the museums where one might get some peace and quiet."

Not being a native can be a barrier to knowing a city intimately and uncovering its romance, but Caulfield, who moved to India in 2004 and works out of her flat in Bangalore, has managed remarkably well.

"The only person I knew when I first came here was the college mate of the mother of a girl I went to school with, who was married to a film director in Mumbai." "Today," she says with pride, "my Bangalore book is used by many Bangaloreans to explore their own city."

There will be many, undoubtedly, who will find fault with Love Delhi, crib about its arbitrariness, its commonplace and frequently lame advice to tourists ("everyone is called "yaar" or friend"), but it says a lot about Indians and their relationship with the cities they live in, that it is a foreigner who should come in and write it.