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,…
The annual blockbuster. [Text and photos by Mayank Austen Soofi] Picnicking year after year outside Old Delhi’s Jama Masjid during Ramzan nights is like re-reading a favourite Ghalib couplet. Everything is familiar, and yet each thing is a thrill, as…
Celebrating Marcel Proust. [Text and photos by Mayank Austen Soofi] 10 July is a special date. It is the Happy Birthday of Marcel Proust, author of the seven-volume French novel À la Recherché du Temps Perdu, known to the English-speaking…
The 88th death. [Text and photo by Gayatri Jayaraman] She objectified men, because there is more than one way to close the gender divide. When she laughed, she cried such that it was confusing to know, at any point, whether…
The family sweeteners. [Text and photos by Mayank Austen Soofi] With the sudden closure in July 2015 of the historic Ghantewala confectionery in Old Delhi’s Chandni Chowk, it has become more urgent to record the daily grind of the area’s…
The party secrets. [Text and photos by Mayank Austen Soofi] It was raining. The famous TV news anchor Sagarika Ghose still managed to reach the India International Center (IIC) on time. She was to stage a conversation with author and…
The bookish bookseller. [Text and photos by Mayank Austen Soofi] Ajit Vikram Singh is the founder of the cramped Fact and Fiction Booksellers, the capital’s most eclectic bookstore. No other place in Delhi offers such rich selections of books in…
The 87th death. [Text and photo by Kanza Javed] If literature touches you, you are no longer afraid of contemplating the otherwise melancholic subjects, like your own death for instance, a theme explore and re-explored countless times in fiction that…
The remarkable Delhi instant. [Text and photos by Mayank Austen Soofi] One man is carrying a plastic bucket filled with rose-flavoured milk. Another is doling out Parle G biscuits. It is a miserably humid evening in the month of Ramzan….
The beautiful untruths. [By Mayank Austen Soofi] The fragmented past lives on in memories. Sometimes it gets marinated in more tangible objects. In the early decades of 20th century, the photo studio of H.A. Mirza & Sons in Chandni Chowk,…
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