Home Sweet Home – Madame Bovary’s Windows, Golf Course Extension Delhi Homes by The Delhi Walla - February 16, 20210 A house of windows. [By Mayank Austen Soofi] It’s midnight. Her fourth-floor house is quiet. Her daughter, husband and ma-in-law are sleeping. She settles down on the durrie by the window, lights a diya, pours herself a glass of red wine, and opens her much-scrawled copy of Madame Bovary. Sugandha Sehgal, 36, teaches this novel to grad students. An assistant professor in Delhi University’s Jesus and Mary College, she has taken leave from work to finish her doctoral thesis on “bodies out of context: politics and aesthetics of social media feminism.” Late last month, she shifted from her longtime house in Delhi’s Dwarka to Gurgaon, in Sector 62, Golf Course Extension. Trying to strike a friendship with the new home, she tells
City Monument – Delhi’s Most Beautiful Door, Gali Badliyan Monuments by The Delhi Walla - February 16, 20211 A heritage nobody knows. [Text and photos by Mayank Austen Soofi] Found. At long last, Delhi’s arguably most beautiful door has been discovered. It doesn’t have a doorbell. It’s not in any of the forts or palaces, or museums. Surely not in the bungalow districts of Golf Links or Vasant Vihar. It doesn’t belong to a temple, or to a mosque. It’s not part of any grand haveli either. It is in Old Delhi, true. But not in Gali Naughara Street, famous for its old houses and doorways. It is somewhere you might never have stepped in. Gali Badliyan is a part of Gali Chooriwallan street, a kind of long winding alley, the turning to it so discreet and the street itself so
City Life – Two Painters, Kamala Nehru Park Life by The Delhi Walla - February 16, 20210 On life and its disappointments. [Text and photos by Mayank Austen Soofi] It is late morning and Manoj and Ravi are sitting in a city garden. The Kamala Nehru Park, tucked next to Gurgaon’s Roshanpura in the Greater Delhi Region, is otherwise largely empty. In their early 20s, both men are quiet. Manoj is drowned in the tree shade but Ravi’s face is speckled with occasional flashes of sunshine. At one point his right eye is immersed in shaded darkness, and the other is soaked in bright daylight, making his face appear like one of those classical paintings of the Renaissance. Both men are painters. Not the artist kind, but house painters. “We are labourers,” says Manoj. “Today is our off, so we