Transported back in time by the Wall at Badaling

Do you like crowds? Do you dig the feel of getting pasted against cold metal in the Beijing subway in rush-hour traffic? Does the fact that the parks, malls, flea markets and pavements outside school compounds at 4 in the afternoon in Beijing are overflowing with people, turn you on?

While for some of my expatriate friends from Scandinavian countries or the sparsely-populated states on the west coast of the United States the concentration of people in Beijing is a novelty, even an opportunity to have a brush with "real people" and pick up a few "survival strategies", I am not so impressed by the crowds in Beijing.

Coming from a city that's just one 16th of Beijing's size but only 4 million short of Beijing's population, I am used to goose-stepping over people sleeping on pavements and dodging the hooded scooters (we call them auto-rickshaws in India) with passengers sticking out of them like candied berries fanning out in all sorts of incredible directions. Beijing will have to get its act together and borrow people from across half of China to compete with my hometown, Kolkata, in terms of population density.