Whilst I have so much to tell you about Delhi; about the block-buster film 'Gadar' (Ghadder in Urdu, a base story about partition which appeals to the basest, most brutish Indian nationalist senses); about 'Lagaan' another block-buster, another silly movie, I must address first a quite needless diplomatic row with India which is now coming to boiling point. This has to do with the Quaid-e-Azam's house at 2, Mount Pleasant Road, on Bombay (or Mumbai)'s Malabar Hill. Pakistan is demanding the house be transferred to it so that it may become the residence of it's Consul General (according to some reports the Consulate itself), whenever the two countries finally agree on reopening consular offices in Bombay and Karachi.

The Quaid's grand-son Nusli Wadia, Chairman of the Rs980-crore Bombay Dyeing conglomerate (among many other businesses) and one of India's richest men is claiming it for himself, most recently being quoted in the pre-summit Indian press as saying that the house was his grand-father's personal property so what does Pakistan have to do with it? Remember please that his mother and Mr Jinnah's only child, Dina Neville Wadia had laid claim to this, her father's property in 1993, filing a writ petition in the Bombay High Court to get possession. It is reported that she withdrew the writ at the admission stage because the Indian government questioned "various disputed facts that occurred in 1944-45, and which she could not 'verify'".

Those "disputed facts" could well be that the Quaid had willed the property to his country. They could indeed confer inalienable rights on the property to Pakistan. But, doesn't Pakistan look small trying to take away a piece of Mr Jinnah's real estate that his heirs lay claim to? The point that needs answering before we go any further is whether we acknowledge Mrs Dina Wadia and her son as the Quaid's heirs? How can we not acknowledge that when Mrs Wadia was invited so publicly to attend Mr Jinnah's Centenary Celebrations in 1976, which invitation she turned down? How can we not when so much was made of Mrs Wadia by Professor Dr Akbar S Ahmed, Anthro Panthro, etcetera, etcetera, when he was involved in the making of the ill-conceived and quite terrible film, Jinnah? Indeed, doesn't it look like infantile nitpicking when, faced with a momentous effort to normalise relations with India through a final settlement of the Kashmir issue, we demand contentious private property situated in India, no matter how costly it might be? To add to everything else, is our government not aware that Nusli Wadia is known to be a very close friend of the Indian Prime Minister? Why then waste our breath? We must accept the fact that the Wadia's do not want to have anything to do with our country, full stop. Let us honour their feelings, if only for the fact that they are Mr Jinnah's successors. Let us not embarrass ourselves any further. Hotel Schehrezade should immediately lift any claims we have on the house, and say that the government of Pakistan would be very happy if it went back to the Quaid's family.

Come then, another short look at Delhi. In my first piece from Delhi I had given my first impressions, gleaned from the drive into Delhi from the airport and I must first of all correct the reference to the plastic bags. There aren't those many as it turned out later, because the government is actively engaged in wiping out this menace. Everywhere you go in Delhi there are signs exhorting you to "Say no to plastic"; most shops use paper bags, including the large and well-run state government Emporia which market textiles and handicrafts manufactured by village organisations and the state's cottage industry. Most importantly there are special plastic collection bins all over the megalopolis, and you will never see municipal sanitary staff setting fire to their sweepings, which might well include plastic bags on the roadsides as you would in any city in Pakistan including Islamabad the Beautiful.

A friend who saw me off at Lahore airport, and who had last been to India ten years ago, said I should have taken a gas mask along, Delhi was so polluted. Well, not any longer. Despite being host to huge numbers of motor traffic, which is more than that of Mumbai, Chennai (Madras), and Calcutta put together, Delhi is well on the way to licking its air pollution problem almost completely. The reason is that most of its public transport, including motor rickshaws, already runs on CNG, and in keeping with an order passed by the Supreme Court all public transport will have to be converted by the end of the year, those that do not having their licences revoked.

It was revealing too, to see that the Indians have not done to their heritage what we have done to ours. Let alone attempting to commercialise and sell state buildings as the worthless Sharif Mafia proposed to do with the State Guest House in Lahore for example, they have kept the buildings in good repair. The Delhi version of Lahore's GOR - the roads skirting the Rashtrapati Bhavan's immense grounds, or what is called Lutjen's (the architect who laid out the official city in the '30s) Delhi, remains as it was. The grounds of the houses have not been cut down, as we did many years ago, building ugly additional housing in them for the expanding civil service. If they needed more housing they went elsewhere and built it. They did not take the short cut, they did not cannibalise. And it is green, God how green is Delhi. The old neem and shisham trees that line every road are leafy beyond explanation for they are allowed to grow. If traffic expanded and there was a need for service roads to take the extra vehicles, they were built around the trees. They were not cut down like Lahore's great beauties were, by the philistine Shahbaz Sharif. Seeing Delhi's shaded avenues hurts all the more when one is reminded by those who knew both cities in times past that Lahore was always more green than Delhi.

If anyone has got the impression that Delhi is Utopia, then let me hasten to correct it. The city has a chronic electricity problem, the power switching on and off, dipping and surging at will, such as we have never seen; its telephones are most erratic, going down at the drop of a hat and whenever some little rain falls. While I can get on to the Internet from my village home via my server in Taxila in twenty seconds flat, you can sit for hours in Delhi trying to log on. It once took me three hours to send an Email to my editor from Delhi. Its roundabouts are used as badly as our's - incoming vehicles forcing their way in, the traffic already on the roundabout screeching to a halt to allow the faster vehicles space. And, yes, when the traffic police are not looking Indians too run the red lights.

Next week: "Gadar" and "Lagaan", and India's trains.