Delhi’s wild side. [Text and pictures by Mayank Austen Soofi] Secretive and silent. Intertwined trees, twisted trunks, thorny twigs, rocky slopes, and clumps of grass. The nearest McDonald’s is two miles away. The Delhi Walla is on Delhi’s Central Ridge,…
The artist as ideologue. [Text and pictures by Mayank Austen Soofi] Artist Chittaprosad Bhattacharya (1915-78), whose retrospective opened in Delhi on July 11th 2011 was most memorably the illustrator of the Bengal Famine of 1943 in which more than three…
Taste explosion. [Text and pictures by Mayank Austen Soofi] It is more felt than tasted. The shell cracks open, the cold, intense spiciness washes around your mouth. Before you know what is happening it is gone. Made of whole-wheat or…
The sufi princess. [Text and pictures by Mayank Austen Soofi] Razia Sultan, Nur Jahan, Princess Diana. The most famous women in history are usually caricatured as saints or sluts, or both. Their lives are reduced to tragedies or travesties. Jahanara…
Searching for the stylish. [Text and pictures by Mayank Austen Soofi] The Delhi Walla saw this young man in a street in Chitli Qabar, a neighbourhood in Delhi’s 17th century Old Quarter. He was wearing a mustard-green woolen blazer, black…
Groomed help for the house. [Text and pictures by Mayank Austen Soofi] The maid is in the mall, bar-coded. Standing in a glass display case, she is in a spotless cotton sari, barely there make-up, buffed nails and no jewellery….
Strange encounters in the city. [Text and pictures by Mayank Austen Soofi] It was over in a minute. The Delhi Walla was outside McDonald’s in Janpath, Connaught Place. The traffic light turned red. The cars halted. One was a silver-colored…
An exhibition. [By Mayank Austen Soofi] Flags, according to a Delhi-based novelist, are bits of coloured cloth that governments use to first shrink-wrap people’s brains and then as ceremonial shrouds to bury the dead. In an exhibition at the American…
A musical evening with the essayist. [Pictures by Mayank Austen Soofi] While launching Broken Republic – Three Essays at the India Habitat Center in May 2011, Arundhati Roy read the book’s introduction that touches upon the lives of Delhi’s street…
The beautiful Delhi instant. [Text and pictures by Mayank Austen Soofi] One morning The Delhi Walla was at a flat in Vasundhra Valley Apartments, a grey-colored housing complex in Sahibabad, a township beyond Delhi’s eastern limits. Sitting cross-legged on a…
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