City Hangout – Basant Lok Market, South Delhi Hangouts by The Delhi Walla - October 29, 2011October 30, 20118 Once it was happening. [Text and photos by Mayank Austen Soofi] Dry fountain, broken benches, shoe shine boys, doped beggars, stray cows, and palmists making suspicious predictions. Don’t judge Basant Lok Market by its rundown look. In the heart of south Delhi’s Vasant Vihar – home to foreign diplomats – this shopping plaza has a history. India’s first McDonald’s opened here in 1996, as did the first TGIF (now closed). The legendary Priya cinema that screened dirty English movies in the old days is now the flagship property of PVR Cinemas, India’s first multiplex chain. When vodka was first served in a golgappa, it also happened here, at Punjabi by Nature restaurant. One of Delhi’s most eclectic bookstores, Fact & Fiction, is situated
City Monument – Firuz Shah Kotla Ruins, Bahadur Shah Zafar Marg Monuments by The Delhi Walla - October 27, 2011November 8, 20113 The fifth city. [Text and photos by Mayank Austen Soofi] Built as the citadel of Firoz Shah Tughlaq, along the banks of the Yamuna, this is now a ruin. Firuzabad, the fifth city of Delhi, once extended from Hauz Khas to Pir-Ghaib (near Bara Hindu Rao hospital) but most buildings were vandalized during the construction of the new city of Shahjahanabad. This is one of the few Delhi ruins that is not patronized by tourists or romantic couples. The once-scenic gateways lead to nowhere and the stairs go up to gloomy circular chambers. Squirrels race up the stone ramparts and colonies of pigeons and parakeets fly out of reach of the numerous cats. On Thursday nights people who believe they are possessed by
Photo Essay – In Search of Lost Time, Shahjahanabad Photo Essays by The Delhi Walla - October 25, 2011October 25, 201110 The black & white Delhi. [Text by Mayank Austen Soofi] A city is built of dreamed memories. More than three centuries have elapsed since the founding of Shahjahanabad on the banks of the Yamuna. Shahjahanabad today is a different country. The river’s course has drifted further east. The dynasty that established the Walled City has been extinguished; the palaces are in ruins; the nobility has disappeared; the wall has been destroyed. The straight lines of bazaars, mohallas and kuchas have broken ranks. Time cannot be turned back. While strolling in Shahjahanabad's streets, The Delhi Walla is sometimes suddenly jolted by a sign from long ago – a doorway, a window, a pillar, or a tomb. In a flash I’m transported to a faraway
City Food – Julia Child Makes Chana Dal Gosht in Civil Lines Food Julia Child's Delhi by The Delhi Walla - October 23, 2011October 24, 20113 The great chef’s life in Delhi. [Text and pictures by Mayank Austen Soofi] Meet the Julia Child of Civil Lines, a genteel neighbourhood of bungalows and apartments in north Delhi. Passionate about writers like Oscar Wilde, Mark Twain, George Bernard Shaw, Anita Desai and Qurratulain Haider, Ms Child, 55, lives in a book-lined ground floor apartment with her author husband, Irfan Habib, and two sons, Mehran and Farhan. She tweets under the handle @atiyaz. There she describes herself as “publishng head@leading pblshr, pasionate abt edu n gndr isues.Fierce nationalist, bigoted secularist. Luv poetry.Luv criket whn India is wining.” Ms Child grew up in various cities of India; her father had a transferable post in the Reserve Bank of India. The family always had
City Obituary – Zubeida Bano, Shahjahanabad Life by The Delhi Walla - October 22, 2011October 22, 20111 Death of a Delhiwalla. [Text and photo by Mayank Austen Soofi] Zubeida Bano, a cultured dweller of Shahjahanabad, died on August 9th, aged 72. The Delhi Walla had profiled her in the website’s Mission Delhi project. The arc of Ms Bano’s life began at a high point of wealth and influence and went downward, like that of her Walled City, the capital of the Mughal empire. Born in a big Muslim household in Chawri Bazaar, Ms Bano’s family fortunes nosedived in the years that followed the independence. A life in the ancestral mansion ended soon. Her mother died early; her father died while they were living in one of a series of hovels that was their home. Belonging to a time when it was rare
City Moment – Street Lost & Regained, Nizamuddin Basti Moments by The Delhi Walla - October 19, 2011October 19, 20114 The beautiful Delhi instant. [Text and photos by Mayank Austen Soofi] It is evening. The Delhi Walla is walking down the principal lane in Nizamuddin Basi, a 14th century village in central Delhi, named after a sufi saint. The street is teeming with pilgrims, beggars, and vendors of kebabs, perfumes, caps and sandals. It is difficult to make way through the dense crowd. Suddenly, a hissing sound. In front of Urdu poet Mirza Ghalib’s tomb: haze. The bearded men standing in front of the Markaz, the spiritual headquarters of Tableeqi Jamaat, an austere Islamic organization, are looking on calmly. The hiss is getting louder, like that of a steam engine picking up speed. A green van, the seeming source of this mystery,
City Food – Roadside Chai, Around Town Food by The Delhi Walla - October 17, 2011October 17, 20117 King of brews. [Text and photos by Mayank Austen Soofi] As Delhi acquires the trappings of a modern metropolis, the carts dedicated exclusively to serving tea are becoming fewer. But it is still possible to stop in the middle of a busy road and quench one's thirst for tea for just a couple of rupees. Until early 2011, each morning, be it winter or summer, an old sari-clad woman - a migrant from Bihar - would pull in her chai cart at the entrance of Hauz Khas Village, south Delhi. As the tea boiled on her kerosene stove, morning walkers from the adjacent Rose Garden and Deer Park arrived to sit on cement blocks placed beside the cart where they read the
City Life – Home Sweet Home, Ranjit Singh Road Delhi Homes by The Delhi Walla - October 16, 2011September 29, 20153 Inside the walls. [Text and photos by Mayank Austen Soofi] One afternoon The Delhi Walla entered the home of Muhammed Rashid Khan. There is no doorbell because there is no door. Mr Khan, 40, lives with his wife and three children on a pavement in Ranjit Singh Road, central Delhi. Their neighbours are a few abusive homeless drug addicts. The family keeps its distance. Mr Khan was a rickshaw puller in Allahabad, a town 500 km from Delhi. He arrived in the capital a month ago. His wife, Noorjahan Begum, suffers from great pains in the stomach. Since doctors in Allahabad could not treat the disease, the couple decided to get a medical check-up at the Lok Nayak Hospital in Delhi. Noorjahan Begum’s medicine
City Library – Chandrahas Choudhury’s Books, Kalkaji Library by The Delhi Walla - October 14, 2011October 15, 20112 A vanishing world. [Text and photos by Mayank Austen Soofi] One late evening The Delhi Walla knocked at the door of author Chandrahas Choudhury. In his 30s, Mr Choudhury lives on the second floor of a bungalow in Kalkaji, south Delhi. He shares his one-room apartment with “a couple of hundreds of books.” The room is sparse: a bed, a chair, a table, a lamp, a laptop, a fan and a wooden almirah. Everything is in order, with exceptions. I, Lalla: The Poems of Lal Ded, the translated works of a fourteenth-century Kashmiri mystic, is on the floor, along with the day’s The Indian Express. Two books are lying haphazardly on the bed: The Battle of Employment Guarantee, edited by Jean Dreze and Reetika
City Monument – Khwaja Mir Dard’s Tomb, Near Zakir Husain College Monuments by The Delhi Walla - October 12, 2011October 31, 20112 The resting place of Delhi’s great poet-saint. [Text and photos by Mayank Austen Soofi] It is one of Delhi’s most melancholic monuments. The tomb of Khwaja Mir Dard (1721-1785), an Urdu poet and a Sufi saint, is beautiful, but not in a conventional way. It has no dome. Situated near Zakir Husain College, next to the glass highrise of Municipal Council of Delhi, the tomb is not of marble or red sandstone, but of bricks. The roof is of tin, painted white. The upper part of the wall is of crude wire mesh. The concrete portion has drawings of flowers. The green circular shrine is caved in by a congested neighborhood of unpainted apartments and hole-in-the-wall shops, which is named after its patron