Letter from Venice – A home in Venezia, Calle delle Canne Travel by The Delhi Walla - May 13, 2015May 13, 20152 Inside a Venetian home. [Text and photos by Mayank Austen Soofi] The first floor window usually remains open during the day. A pedestrian walking on the street outside just have to crane his neck upwards to have a glimpse of jam-packed bookshelves. This is Pia Nainer's drawing room. One early afternoon The Delhi Walla enters her dimly lit apartment. She lives in Calle delle Canne, near the Bridge of the Three Arches on the west side of Venice. Ms Nainer is a painter, though for many years she gave flute lessons in a music school. She shares this 4-room apartment with her husband, Giovanni, daughter, Giulia, and dog, Lilla. Her husband is a professor of architecture. Her daughter attends college. The ground floor consists
City List – 20 Living Urdu Writers, Dehli Delhi by List by The Delhi Walla - May 11, 2015December 27, 20164 Beyond Ghalib. [Text and photos by Mayank Austen Soofi] An English newspaper reader is more likely to have heard of Upamanyu Chatterjee (who lives in Nizamuddin East) or Aatish Taseer (near Lodi Garden) than Khalid Jawed (Okhla) or Anjum Usmani (Lodi Colony). To get a sense of Delhi’s Urdu literary landscape, The Delhi Walla has mapped 20 writers, detailing where they came from, where they live now, and what their day jobs are. Being Urdu-illiterate, I took the help of author Rakhshanda Jalil and Urdu website Rekhta.org founder Sanjiv Saraf in selecting the writers. While these men and women are not the only ones being published in that language, their brief profiles give a sense of the scene in Delhi, or—as Urdu-speakers would have
Our Self-Written Obituaries – Abhijit Dutta, Singapore Farewell Notice by The Delhi Walla - May 11, 2015May 11, 20151 The 68th death. [Text by Abhijit Dutta; photo by Sebastian Ku] Fittingly, Abhijit Dutta died mid sentence, hanging from the edge of a comma. He had always been a man of great ambition. Indeed, his ambitions were so great and so many that he never found the urge or patience to accomplish any of them. Being Bengali, and that too of a lineage that included the indolent nabobs of shovabazar rajbaari and the effete poet Toru Dutt, he had a suitable disdain for anyone who suggested that he might consider putting in “real” work, in the sense of joules, to advance some of these phantom ambitions into whole beings, complete with an end. Instead, he chose to squander away a lifetime reading
Atget’s Corner – 791-795, Delhi Photos Delhi Pics by The Delhi Walla - May 10, 20150 The visible city. [By Mayank Austen Soofi] Delhi is a voyeur’s paradise and The Delhi Walla also makes pictures. I take photos of people, streets, flowers, eateries, drawing rooms, tombs, landscapes, buses, colleges, Sufi shrines, trees, animals, autos, libraries, birds, courtyards, kitchens and old buildings. My archive of more than 25,000 photos showcases Delhi’s ongoing evolution. Five randomly picked pictures from this collection are regularly put up on the pages of this website. The series is named in the memory of French artist Eugène Atget (1857-1927), who, in the words of a biographer, was an “obsessed photographer determined to document every corner of Paris before it disappeared under the assault of modern improvements.” Here are Delhi photos numbered 791 to 795. 791. Lodhi Gardens 792. Place Unknown 793.
Letter from Venice – Proust in French, Castello Delhi Proustians by The Delhi Walla - May 9, 2015May 9, 20154 In search of Marcel. [Text and photos by Mayank Austen Soofi] The Delhi Walla is performing a Proustian pilgrimage in Venice, a place that was special to French novelist Marcel Proust. One day I visited Libreria “Acqua Alta” in Castello. It is home to a couple of black cats and to thousands of second-hand books. I chanced upon Within a Budding Grove, the second volume of Proust’s novel In Search of Lost Time. But this one was in original French, titled À l'ombre des jeunes filles en fleur. Its white cover was bordered with red and black lines. Its spine was torn at the edges. Its pages were soft. The first page said: "Copyright by Gaston Gallimard. Paris 1919." The last page said:
Our Self-Written Obituaries – Sayantan Ghosh, Pondicherry Farewell Notice by The Delhi Walla - May 8, 2015May 8, 20152 The 67th death. [Text by Sayantan Ghosh; photo by a 'House Guest'] “I thought he had died long ago” -- this was the first reaction of Sayantan Ghosh’s friend Nandu when we contacted him over the phone, informing him of Mr Ghosh’s demise. Nandu, who is a fisherman in Varkala, a coastal town in Kerala, was otherwise happy to hear that his was the only number that was found on Mr Ghosh’s phone at the time of his death. The body was discovered by a neighbor who had sneaked inside Mr Ghosh's one-room apartment in Pondicherry to steal his collection of rare first editions of Albert Camus's books, the only thing he was possessive about during his final years. Mr Ghosh's half-eaten corpse
City Life – Home Sweet Home, Mathura Road Delhi Homes by The Delhi Walla - May 7, 2015September 29, 20151 Inside the walls. [Text and photos by Mayank Austen Soofi] One late morning The Delhi Walla enters the home of Zeenat Begum. In her late 30s, she lives on Mathura Road with her father-in-law, two children, and a friend. “I ask for money at the traffic light,” she says. “We ran away from her home in Bihar a few years ago. There was nothing there.” Ms Begum’s house occupies a part of the pavement and looks as messy as a Middle Income Group apartment. A toy car is parked against a pile of bed sheets. A bundle of clothes are dumped on a stack of folded bed sheets. A plastic jar of refined flour stands beside a packet of detergent powder. An empty
Our Self-Written Obituaries – Alok Prasanna Kumar, H. Nizamuddin West Farewell Notice by The Delhi Walla - May 6, 2015May 6, 20151 The 66th death. [Text by Alok Prasanna Kumar; photo by Ankit Goel] Alok Prasanna Kumar, a legal policy expert and collector of trivia about the Indian legal system, was found dead yesterday by the police in his flat in Hazrat Nizamuddin West. The neighbours had complained of a strong stench with no one answering to the door bell. Mr Kumar was 33. The cause of death has been determined to be exhaustion and dehydration which resulted from a marathon session of playing Starcraft 2: Legacy of the Void - an end eerily similar to the so-called 'Self-Written Obituary' he had submitted two years ago to the popular website 'The Delhi Walla'. The Delhi Police are presently questioning the owner of the website, Mayank
Netherfield Ball – Vedova Opening Party, Zattere, Venice City Parties by The Delhi Walla - May 6, 2015August 12, 20152 The party secrets. [Text and photos by Mayank Austen Soofi] One cool evening The Delhi Walla attended the opening of 'Frammenti Expo ’67: Alexander Calder, E Emilio Vedova', an art exhibition in Magazzino del Sale in Zattere, Venice. (I'm in Europe!) The venue was a former salt godown. Some of the guests were the most distinguished members of the Venetian society, the kind who have massive collections of museum-material paintings piled up in their palace-like homes. These important people stood by the Canale della Giudecca and made unimportant talks over rounds of aperitifs. Mario Messinis, Italy's great music critic and former art director of La Fenice opera house, arrived with his professor wife, the lovely Paola. They go to every notable party of
Atget’s Corner – 786-790, Delhi Photos Delhi Pics by The Delhi Walla - May 5, 20150 The visible city. [By Mayank Austen Soofi] Delhi is a voyeur’s paradise and The Delhi Walla also makes pictures. I take photos of people, streets, flowers, eateries, drawing rooms, tombs, landscapes, buses, colleges, Sufi shrines, trees, animals, autos, libraries, birds, courtyards, kitchens and old buildings. My archive of more than 25,000 photos showcases Delhi’s ongoing evolution. Five randomly picked pictures from this collection are regularly put up on the pages of this website. The series is named in the memory of French artist Eugène Atget (1857-1927), who, in the words of a biographer, was an “obsessed photographer determined to document every corner of Paris before it disappeared under the assault of modern improvements.” Here are Delhi photos numbered 786 to 790. 786. Place Unknown 787. Hazrat Nizamuddin