India, July 11 -- The itinerary is more or less universal. Every possibility comes freighted with the imperative "must". These are the sights you must see, these the things you must do. And if you stick to this routine, the city as you imagine it-imaginary Paris-would begin to correspond quite well with reality.
Then there is that other, coarser reality of Paris, away from the tourism propaganda. This is the Paris of social divisions, of joblessness and anomie, of ethnically marked ghettos and banlieues. The paranoid Paris of serial muggings and terror attacks and pickpockets on the Metro. How is one to escape all that? As the public-service announcements would have you believe: by avoiding the no-go areas; by being alert; by keeping your ...