City Nature – Trees, Gurugram Railway Station Nature by The Delhi Walla - March 5, 20240 Platform arbour. [Text and photo by Mayank Austen Soofi] The evening sun is slinking into the distant west. The air in the immediate vicinity is powdery, either with dust, or with the gathering mist, or perhaps it is simply smog. A man in half-sweater is slouching by the railway tracks. Behind him, a Brobdingnagian tree, the trunk the size of a train compartment, is lording over the scene with its millions of leaves. Will this banyan have a role in the tomorrow’s scheme of things? Late last month the Prime Minister laid the foundation for revamping the Gurgaon railway station under the Amrit Bharat Station Scheme, a project in which 554 stations will be redeveloped at a cost of over 19,000 crores rupees.
City Nature – Songs of Semal, Around Town Nature by The Delhi Walla - February 26, 20240 Red season. [Text and photo by Mayank Austen Soofi] Late-February afternoon. Auto rickshaw carting the commuter along one of the loopy highways of the circuitous AIIMS flyover. Sky is pitch blue. Other sights totally unremarkable. Suddenly, a tree dotted with red. The blossoming of semal marks the debut of Delhi’s most tolerable season — neither cold nor hot. Unidentifiable the rest of the year, these trees abruptly become as apparent as the red-capped ear cleaners of Turkman Gate Bazar. Semal is among the 252 species of trees found in the Delhi region (Poor New York has only 130!). The tiered branches shoot out from the trunk like the ribs of a parasol. Look out for semal in Delhi’s diplomatic avenues, such as Neeti
City Season – Floss Silk Flowers, Around Town Nature by The Delhi Walla - October 27, 20230 Season's shade. [Text and photos by Mayank Austen Soofi] Blue is marrying into green, and green is marrying into pink. Here, near Humayun’s tomb. The blue constitutes the dome of the centuries-old Neela Gumbad; the green is the lush foliage of the surrounding trees. These two elements exist throughout the year. The pink is a guest, belonging to this season. Floss silk flowers are in bloom. This same pink is smeared thicker, wider some distance away in Lodhi Garden, which has a great number of floss silk trees. The flowers fall continually, discreetly, making the grassy ground beneath the trees smoulder like a bed of pink-hot coals. This afternoon, in one of the remoter expanses within the garden, far from the walking tracks,
City Season – Saptaparni Blossoms, Around Town Nature by The Delhi Walla - October 18, 20230 In search of flowers. [Text and photo by Mayank Austen Soofi] Last night was a violent night, à la Wuthering Heights. There was thunder, lightning, and for a few minutes the hissing wind raged like a storm. This overcast morning, unlike the sunny morning yesterday, the ground under the tree is barely littered with its flowers. Perhaps most of the blossoms were swept away by the storm. The tree that until the day before was full of flowers is bare of them, here near Ashram crossing. Hopefully the short season of saptaparni, lasting from mid-October to December, shall not meet a premature end. And this saptamarni tree will be re-decked with flowers. Unlike the golden-yellow Amaltases or the red Gulmohurs, saptaparni flowers aren’t attention
City Nature – Tree Heroes, M-Block, Greater Kailash 2 Life Nature by The Delhi Walla - August 30, 2023August 30, 20231 Icons of a tree-lined road. [Text and photo by Mayank Austen Soofi] Rendered conscious by the camera, these three are standing stiffly under the long slant branch of a tree. Years ago, Dharamveer, Hasan, Azim, and a handful of others not seen in the photo, planted a dozen or so saplings on this road with no prior coordination. Those saplings have grown into gigantic trees. Dripping green with their dense foliage, the trees make a patchy roof of leaves along the tarmac, filling up the space underneath with shade, fresh air and coolness. This afternoon, a gentleman is snoozing under a peepal, while sprawled on a string cot. The short tree-lined road lies hidden behind M Block Market in Greater Kailash 2. It is
City Hangout – July Cloud Watching, Around Town Hangouts Nature by The Delhi Walla - July 26, 20230 The pleasure of merely circulating. [Text and photo by Mayank Austen Soofi] Full of the pomp and stateliness of emeritus professors, they are broodily sauntering about the empty space, indulging in the rarefied pleasures of merely circulating. These clouds of our late-July sky. One of the bad news these days is the weather. Unbearable humidity. Short spells of rain make it worse. While a full fledged session of rain raises fears of renewed flooding. And the sun isn’t being a friend. The consolation is the beautiful day sky, freckled with clouds. The only happy people must be the city’s countless nephophiles, the cloud connoisseurs. Naturally, at this time of the year, one ought to return to the highway commute between Gurgaon’s Shankar
City Walk – Monsoon Stroll, Civil Lines Nature Walks by The Delhi Walla - July 19, 2023July 19, 20230 Civil Lines impressionism. [Text and photo by Mayank Austen Soofi] A well-known couple residing in upscale Civil Lines, in north Delhi, recently checked themselves for a few days into a room at the India International Center (Annexe). Reason: their area got flooded, prompting problems like long power cuts, etc. Civil Lines is just too close to the Yamuna. But then there’s another Civil Lines in our megapolis, much further from the river, and as civil. This one is in Gurgaon, and, like all its counterparts spreads across India, was set up by the British to house the district administrators. Parts of the enclave are sleepy, but charmingly addictive, demanding a repeat return each time you yearn for silence and slow time. Particularly
City Life – Delhi Floods, 2023 Life Nature by The Delhi Walla - July 17, 2023July 17, 20230 The bridge under the Yamuna. [Text and photos by Mayank Austen Soofi] Delhi has more than 15 road bridges spanning over the Yamuna. In the city’s worst flood in 45 years, here’s a sequence of interactions with the citizens and the city in and around the Nizamuddin Bridge. The sound and the fury If you close your eyes, you might as well be standing by some angry mountain stream falling noisily over the rocks. In ordinary times, Delhi’s Yamuna is a discreet river, the banks under the busy Nizamuddin Bridge remain dry but often stay lush-green, carpeted with vegetable fields, and with plots of marigold flowers (when marigolds are in season). The Yamuna does stay visible all through the year, but the
City Season – Heatwave Citizens, Around Town Life Nature by The Delhi Walla - June 12, 2023June 12, 20230 June is the cruellest month. [Text and photos by Mayank Austen Soofi] A heap of broken images, where the sun beats, And the dead tree gives no shelter, the cricket no relief, And the dry stone no sound of water… How much more intense these powerful lines would have been if poet TS Eliot had written The Waste Land after surviving a spell of Delhi’s June heatwave. Here’s a snapshot of citizens obliged to work directly under the sun, encountered in peak summer noons present and past. Early afternoon. Daily-wage labourer Sukhi is standing about the so-called “labour chowk” near Gurugram’s Sector 6. Barely beyond his teenage years, he shares a pavement habitat with his “jija,” also a labourer. “The stones (of the pave)
City Season – Summertime Rains, Around Town Nature by The Delhi Walla - June 1, 2023June 1, 20230 Pseudo-monsoon. [Text and photos by Mayank Austen Soofi] Evening rush. Forceful breeze harping wildly through the clogged avenues. Suddenly the cloudy sky breaks. Illumined by the street lamps, the rain projectiles become starkly visible, pouring down on earth like iambs parading through a poem. On Zakir Husain Marg, a man walking by the roadside slinks under a tree for emergency shelter, sitting down on his haunches. A scooterist stops under the same tree, keeping his helmet on (see first photo below). In a season of unbearable heat waves, we are being treated to cool rainy days. The mobile phone weather screen forecasts baarish for today too, and for three consecutive days from Sunday onwards. Here are a handful of monsoon-time classics you might