City Hangout – Forgotten Graveyard, Mathura Road
Lost cemetery. [Text and photos by Mayank Austen Soofi] Could it be the rains? The sprawling ground is choked with weedy grass and unknown plants, so tall and numerous that their tips prick the chin. Wading through is fearful. What…
City Hangout – July Cloud Watching, Around Town
The pleasure of merely circulating. [Text and photo by Mayank Austen Soofi] Full of the pomp and stateliness of emeritus professors, they are broodily sauntering about the empty space, indulging in the rarefied pleasures of merely circulating. These clouds of…
City Life – Green Benches, Lodhi Garden
A readers’ collective. [Text and photos by Mayank Austen Soofi] Not many might register their absence if they were to suddenly disappear from the park. So many of us anyway prefer to lie on the park’s cool grass. Even so,…
City Life – “Lodhi Reads”, Lodhi Garden
A readers’ collective. [Text and photos by Mayank Austen Soofi] A woman in hat is reading a Mahasweta Devi paperback, with the centuries-old Bada Gumbad monument as her backdrop. So far, so ordinary. Reading in park is a regular Lodhi…
City Hangout – Best Monsoon View, Gurgaon
Rainy season’s purple prose. [Text and photo by Mayank Austen Soofi] Can anyone get tired of seeing the monsoon from the same place again and again, if the view happens to be among the most beautiful in the entire Delhi…
City Hangout – Deer Park, Hauz Khas
An iconic park’s profound alteration. [Text and photo by Mayank Austen Soofi] It will soon be a civilisation gone with the wind. The iconic Deer Park in Delhi’s Hauz Khas is set to completely turn around its character. The number…
City Hangout – Yamuna View Point, H. Nizamuddin Bridge
River in the city. [Text and photo by Mayank Austen Soofi] Stumbling into this distant scenery is like randomly opening an old issue of National Geographic magazine, and finding a breathtakingly panoramic two-page spread on some legendary river. But this…
City Life – Gali Haveli Azam Khan, Old Delhi
Street out of a mansion. [Text and photo by Mayank Austen Soofi] The word is spreading along the galis and kuchas. A new eatery is rustling out unorthodox dishes like “chicken white sauce pasta” and “chicken red sauce pasta.” The…
City Hangout – Public Park, Greater Kailash II
Jungle raj. [Text and photos by Mayank Austen Soofi] A huge tree with thousands of leaves. And another tree, dissimilar in the shape of its leaves and the fanning of its branches, but similar in grandness. Then another such tree….
City Life – Gali Chamre Wali Part 1, Old Delhi
Life of a lane. [Text and photo by Mayank Austen Soofi] Tak tak tak tak. An elderly man in an extra-maheen white kurta pajama is walking extremely slowly into the narrow gali. His metal walker is tap-tap-tapping the dusty ground…
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