The Delhi Walla in the fatherland. Heera Mandi, Lahore’s fabled red light district, is almost dead. Most dancing establishments have shut down. The courtesans no longer pretend to be mere dancers. Operating as full-fledged sex workers, they have set up discrete bases in the city’s other areas...
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The Delhi Walla in the fatherland. With its sultry days and breezy evenings, Karachi is cosmopolitan like Bombay, class-driven like Delhi and edgy like Baghdad. It is rich, poor, good, bad, beautiful, ugly, generous, mean. Karachi is the city of lights. Karachi is the city of load...
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The Delhi Walla in the fatherland. Mazar-e-Qaid. Pakistan’s founder Mohammad Ali Jinnah lies buried here. The Delhi Walla is accompanied by Asim Ghani, a Delhi-born Karachiwalla. On the eve of Pakistan’s first Independence Day anniversary (August 14th, 1948), the founder of Pakistan, weighed only eighty pounds. He...
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The Delhi Walla in the fatherland. It is 7 am. The room is lined with old paperbacks. Tiger, the house dog, is looking out of the grill into the garden. Rosemary, the maid, is calling me for breakfast. But I’m listening to the sound of birds. This...
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The Delhi Walla in the fatherland. Reeling under unending terror attacks, Pakistan is all set to host its first major literary event on March 21, 2010. The budget of Karachi Literature Festival is less than the film-signing amount charged by Bollywood actress Kareena Kapoor, whose face is...
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The Delhi Walla in the fatherland. I’m standing outside McDonald’s at Park Towers shopping mall. The sea wind is breezy. The evening traffic is moving at a snail’s pace. Suddenly, a bearded man comes running from Benazir Bhutto Shaheed Park, just across the road. A blinding flash...
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Notes from the fifth Jaipur Literature Festival. The Delhi Walla attended the fifth Jaipur Literature Festival, 2010. The five days were sunny and intense. There were singers, actors, ambassadors, college students, tourists, hippies, aspiring writers, book lovers, socialites, politicians, free-loaders, journalists, and more than 200 authors and...
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Notes from the Jaipur Literature Festival. Click here to reach the complete compilation of the Jaipur Diary His language sits lightly on his shoulders. As one of the few Hindi writers in the fifth Jaipur Literature Festival, Delhi-based poet and cultural critic Ashok Vajpeyi gently rebuffed a...
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Notes from the Jaipur Literature Festival. Click here to reach the complete compilation of the Jaipur Diary Tina Brown, one of America’s most influential editors, is in love with the Jaipur Literature Festival. “I’m addicted to it,” she said while talking to The Delhi Walla. It’s her...
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Notes from the Jaipur Literature Festival. Click here to reach the complete compilation of the Jaipur Diary There is no reason why The Delhi Walla shouldn’t feel lucky to be in the fifth Jaipur Literature Festival. I chatted with the former New Yorker editor Tina Brown. Nobel...
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