City Life – The Descent of Men, Turkman Gate
The Delhi reality.
[Text and photos by Mayank Austen Soofi]
One morning The Delhi Walla saw a grey-haired man asleep on the pavement just outside the Mughal-era monument of Turkman Gate. The man was covered with a sack. Flies buzzed over him. A slipper lay upturned beside his head.
The man’s body was turned towards a puddle. Plastic packets floated on its black water.
Two more men were asleep nearby.
Life went on. The acceptance of utter destitution keeps our city permanently dark. The idea of a beautiful Delhi is sheer lie.
We the Fallen
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Old Delhi is one of the most squalid parts of our transcendentally ugly city.Mind-numbing apathy and civic decay may be also be witnessed in places like Uttam Nagar-Sitapuri-Sagarpur-Bindapur and Silampur-Shahdara.
I hope Kejriwal & Co. spend more money on creating clean, habitable and dignified shelters for the destitute in the future than on plastering the walls of every public lavatory/metro car/ho-ho bus with their inane messages. Their paranoid, juvenile tenor has often made me wonder what the world would have been like had we pressed the NOTA button en masse.
Yes, I agree. There has to be some agency/organization that can rehabilitate destitute/handicapped people including little children forced into begging. The other day in South Ex., I came across a boy, age around 10, with broken legs, sitting helplessly with an empty bowl. I really wished I could do something more than just give him some money. As ordinary individuals working hard to support our own families, there is not much we can do. But if some organization comes forward and is seen taking initiative on this issue, we would gladly like to do all we can for them.
Such a pity, that’s so true Jasbir, hope things get better soon. I also think each one’s partial initiative could help hope the television news channels focus some of their attention here as well.