City Hangout – Poetry Reading Benches, Mirza Ghalib’s Tomb Hangouts by The Delhi Walla - January 22, 20200 Place for poems. [Text and photos by Mayank Austen Soofi] Those good souls who love reading poems will sit down with a poetry anthology just about anywhere. Even while standing in a jam-packed Metro train. But where can one find the most idyllic spot in Delhi for reading verses? A library, perhaps? A simple park bench? Well, sure. Those are the logical spots, quite apart from your very own home. But without question, the ideal milieu has to be the tomb of poet Mirza Ghalib. Located in congested Hazrat Nizamuddin Basti in central Delhi, the tomb is found at one end of a vast walled-in courtyard. The best thing here is the seating arrangement. Once here, you ought to settle down on any of the five
City Region – Slum and ‘Society’, Sector 15, Gurgaon Regions by The Delhi Walla - January 22, 20200 Our disparate lives. [Text and photos by Mayank Austen Soofi] The neighbours are loitering outside their homes, making small talk about the cold weather. Soon enough, the conversation veers towards a “multi-storey society”, or as they would like to call it “society”, coming up behind their houses. It’s not really very high, but looms large because the rest of the houses seem so small here in Gurgaon’s Sector 15 in the Greater Delhi Region. These are single-room dwellings, many of them with tarpaulin sheets as their walls. “Everyone here is either a labourer or a servant,” says Savita Rajat who works as a cleaner in “kothis”. Her husband is an auto-rickshaw driver. The other gentleman, Muhammed Irfan, is a knife seller. He lives in