Manmohan Singh's haunt. [Text and photo by Mayank Austen Soofi] Shelves gone. Desks gone. Cupboards gone. Newspapers gone. Those fat file folders gone. And oh, the magical back-room with its stacks of old New Yorker magazines too gone. The place is unrecognisable. It is instead looking slick with scores of neatly arranged tables and chairs, and is buzzing this afternoon with cooks, waiters, diners. Here’s how cities change. One landmark at a time. The P-block address in Connaught Place housed one of Delhi’s oldest companies distributing newspapers and magazines across the country. The place has today transformed into a brightly lit outlet of a Kolkata-based restaurant chain. The air is smelling of some aromatic hunger-inducing spice. The restaurant opened about two months ago, informs Anshu

Tajikistan, Turkmenistan… Filmistan! [Text and photo by Mayank Austen Soofi] The derelict building is a sprawl of pinkish red concrete. The outer walls are bearded here and there with dry grass. This afternoon, each spear of the long browned grass is trembling soundlessly in the winter’s cold breeze. Delhi is a city of tombs. This building too is a tomb. But it is not a tomb to some fakir or badshah. It instead eulogises an earlier age of movie watching. The vast edifice of Filmistan cinema evokes an era when there were no limitless Netflix movie options and multiplex audis. It was then a civilisation of the “picture hall” where a citizen would watch a matinee or a night show alongside hundreds of

Print edition monument [Text and photo by Mayank Austen Soofi] Names can be deceptive. But not this zila Ghaziabad kiosk. Its name is Akhbar ki Dukaan, says the owner. And it really is akhbar ki dukaan. The roadside shop is crammed with all the English and Hindi dailies that pour into Delhi afresh every morning. The sight in fact looks like a biennale art installation aiming to commemorate a utility that once used to be as ubiquitous as the chai stall—the newspaper stand. The Vasundhara landmark in Sector 4C has been existing since 2003. Founder Kaptan Singh is a UP native from Gonda, and has been in Delhi region since 1991. He started as a mechanic in a washing machine factory in north

Russia in Delhi. [Text and photos by Mayank Austen Soofi] Go to Janpath, and visit a man there with a long flowing beard. Leo Tolstoy stands by the traffic light. It is the Russian writer’s 114th death anniversary. Tolstoy made a most profound impact on the Indian who most profoundly shaped contemporary India. Mahatma Gandhi was famously influenced by Tolstoy’s ideas on non-violence and chastity. He even set up an ashram called Tolstoy Farm during his years in South Africa. That said, the novelist of Anna Karenina is not the only Russian gracing the Delhi boulevards. Poet Pushkin stands at Mandi House. And though the Soviet Union founder Lenin was no novelist, he stands tall in Nehru Park. Indeed, those Delhiwale who came

Walled City's primary graveyard. [Text and photo by Mayank Austen Soofi] One morning, a funeral procession in Old Delhi halts the rush-hour flow of autos in front of Delite Cinema. The mourners are carrying a janaza towards the direction of Dilli Gate Qabristan. The graveyard behind the newspaper offices on Bahadur Shah Zafar Marg happens to be the final address of thousands of Purani Dilli’s Muslim dwellers. It is as dense with graves as Meena Bazar is with machinery stores. Located slightly outside the Walled City’s vanished walls, the qabristan contains some of contemporary Old Delhi’s most distinguished gentry. Urdu poet Mushir Jhinjhianvi, who lived in a house overlooking Chitli Qabar Chowk, lies buried somewhere amid this sprawl. So does the great

A corner off the chaos. [Text and photo by Mayank Austen Soofi] In a megapolis of millions, here’s a table for two. It is actually a bench, and this afternoon two citizens sitting on it are sharing a meal from the same plate. The next bench has a citizen in kurta-pajama lying sprawled along its length, sleeping. The setting could be a public park with grass, flowers and trees. Nothing of that sort. It is all concrete. This infrastructure utility came up six years ago in central Delhi, and is part of a network of pedestrian overpasses, called sky walk, connecting the Supreme Court metro station to scores of tree-lined avenues that span out of the area. For many citizens, this corner

Rembrandt's Dilli. [Text and photos by Mayank Austen Soofi] That’s a Charles Correa. The Connaught Place edifice, Jeevan Bharti, is gigantic, and the front facade looks like a dizzyingly complex network of grids. The late architect designed the capital’s many other noteworthy complexes as well--Tara Apartments, Crafts Museum, and the British Council. But this evening the CP building has transmogrified into something profounder, almost supernatural. The cause is the extraordinary pre-winter sunset that faithfully returns to Delhi skies at this time of the year, just before the annual arrival of the extreme smog. It is half past five and the mid-October sun is dipping behind the Correa creation. The building is partly glowing in gold, though most of the panorama (including the rush-hour