THE United Nations located on the southern tip of Manhattan Island is a pastiche. The real UN is crowded in the rest of New York. Step into the street and the crisp air is punctuated by different smells — kebabs being grilled by vendors, flavours of coffee originating from a number of continents, the genteel aroma of noodles overwhelmed by stronger curries.

New York is as much about sounds as it is about smells. Sit in the various committee rooms of the United Nations and one is reminded how the diversity of languages is not reduced but intensified by translation. Walk among the crowds outside and one is instantly aware of the multiplicity of human expression.

More languages are mouthed in New York’s streets than within the United Nations building. The UN does nothing but preach globalism, incessantly; New York practises it, ceaselessly, 24/7/365.

To enter its Metropolitan Museum of Art is to see humanity searching for its past. There is no known civilisation that is not represented in its majestic galleries, no object that does not make one proud to belong to a species that can produce works of such ineffable beauty.

The poet Wordsworth may have been moved to tears by “the meanest flower” that ever grew. Had he visited the Metropolitan Museum, he would have been in a state of unmanageable emotional collapse.

Every item on display — from the minutest gold earring worn by some ancient beauty to the largest stone obelisks honouring mighty pharaohs — commands individual attention and respect. Certain galleries have remained undisturbed over the years. You can still find a favourite frieze or fragment where you last noticed it. Other galleries have been modernised recently.

Of these, perhaps the most spectacular is the Islamic Gallery — an irresistible display of objects that remind one how much mankind owes to the patronage of princes and to the possessiveness of commoners. Only an emperor like Jahangir would have commissioned a nephrite ink jar

for his use, painstakingly carved in the round out of a stone notorious for its intractability.

Only a self-absorbed princess would have ordered the backing of her hand mirror to be a perforated filigree of green jade, its delicate workmanship displayed to maximum advantage by thoughtful backlighting.

Only missionaries would have peddled as instruments of faith something as mundane as a sheep’s gallstones (known as Goa stones). These objects were polished, gilded and encased in a golden globe for sale to gullible believers. It was as if the Russian jeweller Carl Fabergé had included within one of his lavish Easter eggs the hair-ball of one of the czar’s pets as its surprise.

Close to the Metropolitan Museum, on 79th and Lexington, live Ved Mehta and his lovely wife Linn. Born in Lahore and educated initially at a small school inside Sheranwala Gate in Lahore, Ved broke away from its constrictions to study at Oxford and then at Harvard. He joined the New Yorker as a feature writer and has written a number of books on subjects as varied as memoirs (Face to Face), family biographies (Daddy-ji and Chacha-ji), an expansive Portrait of India, on Christianity (The New Theologian), and one that subtly unfrocked an icon (Mahatma Gandhi and his Apostles).

Today, at the age of 80, Ved Mehta understandably reads more than he writes, but to spend time with him is to be aware of how omnivorous a human intellect can be. His inquisitiveness knows no bounds. He hears and absorbs everything. But that traffic is not simply one way. His insight into the subcontinent’s politics is not diminished by time or distance. He met Nehru and held his own; he could meet Modi and be as interrogative.

He and Linn took the trouble of attending a lecture I had given at the Sikh Art and Film Foundation in New York on May 4. This was the 10th anniversary of the festival, a testament to the resilient commitment of its sponsor Teji Bhindra and his US-Sikh colleagues.

While an early US president Theodore Roosevelt may have abjured the expression “hyphenated American”, today’s American straddles both sides of the hyphen. The US-Sikh community, like every other ethnic group in the US, searches for such occasions to remind itself of its identity.

Very soon, certainly within our lifetime, Mayflower immigrants will be overtaken by those who came by less romantic transport. It has taken centuries for the Americans to have an Afro-American president. It may take a decade more or less to have a female or a Hispanic one. Whoever succeeds Obama should not waste time in Washington or on the United Nations. New York is where the world walks the talk.

The writer is an author and art historian.

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