City Walk – Pandara Road, Central Delhi Walks by The Delhi Walla - November 13, 2024November 13, 20240 Path of the Pandavas. [Text and photos by Mayank Austen Soofi] The empty footpath is shadowed by a dense cover of tree leaves. This smoggy November afternoon, Pandara Road in central Delhi is dead silent. The adjacent houses too aren’t showing any outward sign of life. It is like strolling through a deserted city. The ambience nevertheless is not at all hostile. The area is lined with standard-issue apartments and bungalows. These are homes of high-ranking government personnel. According to recent reports, Bangladesh’s exiled leader Sheikh Hasina is currently residing somewhere in the vicinity. Her “safe house” might not exactly be on Pandara Road, but during her earlier exile to Delhi in the 1970s, following the assassination of her father along with
City Walk – Chanakyapuri, Central Delhi Walks by The Delhi Walla - October 28, 20240 A surreal stroll. [Text and photo by Mayank Austen Soofi] No stars to be seen but the moon up there is lingering like a tiny white hole at the top of the greyish black sky. While down here, the deserted pave is bordered by unwieldly trees which cast upon the ground, wherever they are lit by street-lamps, the Japanese stencil of their shadows. Sudden gusts of cooling breeze is also rippling along from moment to moment. The pavement borders a wide road, presently empty. An evening stroll in Chanakyapuri makes for one of Delhi’s most sublime walks. The premium locality is the address of embassies and foreign diplomats. It is just 8 O’clock in the evening, and the place is as lively
City Walk – Gali Salim Mohd Shah, Old Delhi Life Walks by The Delhi Walla - October 14, 20240 The street of sparrows. [Text and photo by Mayank Austen Soofi] They are popping out of the green leaves like soap bubbles. Then they spread into the warm dusty air, quickly vanishing (like soap bubbles). Moments later, they are again sighted, as they return to the leaves. These are sparrows. The birds reside amid the cooling darkness of a gigantic hanging garden of malti vines. This must be among the very few places in Old Delhi where you may spot Delhi’s state bird, whose sightings have grown less common over the years. Indeed, the rare spectacle rescues Gali Salim Mohd Shah from ordinariness. Otherwise it has a severely minuscule scope. Some may simply dismiss the gali as a forgettable side-alley of Kucha
City Walk – Gali Lal Darwaza, Old Delhi Regions Walks by The Delhi Walla - August 26, 20240 A Walled City lane. [Text and photos by Mayank Austen Soofi] The yellow door headlines the saffron doorway, and the wall around is light blue. The sight dazzles the eye. It is one of the many compulsively clickable private doorways on this Walled City street, which is actually named after a doorway. Gali Lal Darwaza is entered, naturally,, through a lal darwaza, red doorway. This long lane near Bazar Sitaram goes past a series of residences and temples before ending into a… well, doorway. Here’s a severely truncated tour of Lal Darwaza darwazas. —An unusually tall wooden door graced by a sculpted Ganesh ji forms the portal to Jugal Bhawan, marked with the year 1953. —A doorway’s dark-wood door is arrayed out
City Neighbourhood – Gali Haveli Kallu Khawas, Old Delhi Hangouts Regions Walks by The Delhi Walla - August 17, 20240 The world of a long lane. [Text and photo by Mayank Austen Soofi] What to write about it? This is just a narrow lane remarkable only for looking too-too unremarkable. Its mouth at the bustling Chitli Qabar Bazar street is flanked by a bangle stall. Whatever, the gali seems short and dull, it must end some dozen steps ahead on reaching that facing wall. The lane reaches the wall, but doesn’t end there. It veers to the left, goes straight, turns sharply to the right, goes straight, to the right again, straight, to the left, finally ending into a panel of partly pink doorways. Contradicting the first impression, the entire path turns out to be dense with many sights and many sounds. Such
City Neighbourhood – GB Road, Old Delhi Walks by The Delhi Walla - August 11, 2024August 11, 20240 A place in the city. [Text and photo by Mayank Austen Soofi] Garstin Bastion Road has colonial-era landmarks—Siddiq Building is from 1939. It has a Hanuman temple and a sufi dargah. It has shops for bathroom fittings, and for machines with names like mechanical seals, rubber dori, and nylon sandwich belt. It has an “all women police post.” It even has a monument—Ajmeri Gate is one of the few surviving gateways of the Walled City’s mostly vanished wall. GB Road is extremely accessible. It is next-door to New Delhi railway station, a mere 15-minute walk from Connaught Place. Indeed, the many scenes of GB Road are also the scenes of any other place in the capital--cars, bikes, bullock carts (see photo!). rickshaws,
City Neighbourhood – Gali Pyaun Wali, Chawri Bazar Faith Regions Walks by The Delhi Walla - August 4, 20240 Lane with a well and temple. [Text and photo by Mayank Austen Soofi] Maa Durga, Bhagwan Krishen with Radha ji, Devi Sita with Bhagwan Ram, and Hanuman ji… all these divinities are present, their portraits sanctifying the temple’s blue walls. The eyes though are first drawn to Shiv Bhagwan. The life-like statue’s right palm is bestowing a blessing, while the wrists are adorned with marigold malas. The eyes next wander down to something less common for a sanctum sanctorum. A blue hand-pump. It stands where a kuan is said to have existed. For centuries, that well diligently served this part of the Walled City, a passer-by says. Inevitably the place came to be identified as a general pyaun of drinking water for the
City Neighbourhood – Kucha Baqaullah Khan Hangouts Walks by The Delhi Walla - July 27, 20240 One of the two brothers. [Text and photos by Mayank Austen Soofi] Once upon a time there were “do bhai”— Rohilla Khan and Baqaullah Khan. Both brothers were Mughal nobles. The assertion is forcefully made by a handful of men idling this humid evening at Kucha Baqaullah Khan. (The same claim was asserted one afternoon months ago by a few men idling at the neighbouring Kucha Rohilla Khan—a street already featured on The Delhi Walla). The entry to Baqaullah’s blind alley is like a hole in the wall, sandwiched between the hole-in-the-wall shops of Chitli Qabar Bazar. Fortunately, the green-bordered signboard bearing the street’s name is easily discernible. The other marker is the huge black tank perched atop the tricoloured gateway. Inside, the unpainted
City Neighbourhood – Hamdadrd Chowk, Old Delhi Hangouts Landmarks Walks by The Delhi Walla - July 27, 20240 Circle of birds. [Text and photo by Mayank Austen Soofi] This humid afternoon the circular traffic island of Hamdard Chowk on Asaf Ali Road is filled, as always, with hundreds of pigeons. The traffic noise is reaching into the sprawling circle weakened and indistinct. A man in white kurta pajama is slowly walking about the circle, stopping frequently, picking up things from the circle’s surprisingly high platform, and he is putting those things… into his mouth! These are broken pieces of mithai that somebody must have placed for the pigeons, he says. He doesn’t give reasons for consuming these himself. ‘Partner in pain’ in Urdu, the chowk’s name comes from the facing headquarters of Hamdard Laboratories At night, the traffic circle’s surroundings--the
City Life – Ramjas Path, Daryaganj Life Walks by The Delhi Walla - July 7, 2024July 7, 20240 Of silence and song [Text and photo by Mayank Austen Soofi] The lane is steeped in ‘pin drop silence,’ just the thing the teachers at the school ahead might expect from their students. The short Ramjas Paath in Daryaganj is lined with a handful of enormous pilkhans, whose thick brown branches gently spread upon the lane, colonising the upper altitudes, hiding much of the sky from the earth. A pair of vessels are hanging from a branch high up in the air; one of those is said to filled with grains for the birds, another is filled with water. Aam Panna seller Yameen shows a rope-and-pulley apparatus equipped around the tree’s wrinkled trunk. “It brings down the vessels to our level for