Stories about Delhi, or with a Delhi connection.
A budget weekend in purani Dilli ♦ The most difficult decision I had to make while packing for a weekend in Old Delhi, was what sort of attitude I ought to carry with me to this contiguous yet discrete part of the capital city. Many travellers have written about how home can only be understood once …
In the neighbourhood ♦ I have never found Buddhist kitsch a particularly comforting form of interior decoration. But about two weeks ago, I found myself sitting in Hawker’s House, my neighbourhood’s beloved little sandwich shop, and something about the photo of a standing Buddha sculpture, its smooth, lean arm raised reassuringly in the abhaya mudra, …
Theatre of persuasion ♦ Last month, a strange plant took root in the hard soil of the Capital. Its season is rare – roughly once every five years; and its life cycle determined not by the laws of nature, but by those of the nation. Its steel stems and plastic foliage flourish in a hotbed …
The eyes have it ♦ On the occasional morning, a tall, dark, handsome man and his short, dark, even more handsome Labrador visit the pocket-handkerchief of a park opposite my house. Once in awhile, the man happens to look up towards my balcony and, suddenly, the world is transformed. The scraggly park becomes a charbagh …
Farewell to winter ♦ Winter ends as it began, its first and last trace a lingering scent, like the whiff of tobacco on a smoker’s shawl. All season, the city has mostly been a smudged landscape in indeterminate shades of grey, lifted from a palette of fog, smog, smoke, haze and mist. Hindi might have …
Seasonal rituals ♦ In the narrow confines of Eve’s tailoring shop in Greater Kailash, bunched up between the brocade-covered, sequin-strewn counters and the walls plastered with neckline patterns, a queue of ladies jostles surreptitiously, packed like the rack of blouses hanging behind the unflappable form and appraising eyes of owner Vineet Kumar. In the old …
Guilt plated ♦ Judging by the tremors Pangaea has caused in the lifestyle media with the news of its opening, the nightclub at the Hotel Ashok promises a seismic shift in the after dark life of the capital. The club aims to “redefine high-end entertainment”, said Spice Global chairman and owner BK Modi in Blouin …
Walking with a purpose ♦ “Every walk is a sort of crusade,” wrote Henry David Thoreau in his essay on “Walking”. His particular idea of a stroll had more to do with venturing into nature to reclaim one’s wildness than ambling through a city, but his words feel like a true characterization of walking in …
A Conversation With: Literary Critic and Novelist Shamsur Rahman Faruqi ♦ India’s literary establishment is abuzz about the recently published novel “The Mirror of Beauty,” a 984-page fictional account about the life and times of Wazir Khanam, the mother of the famed Urdu poet Daag Dehalvi, set mostly in Delhi and its environs during the …
The last century of Mughal rule comes to life in The Mirror of Beauty, Shamsur Rahman Faruqi’s compelling picture of Delhi and its wider world ♦ View as PDF Beloved of poets and coveted by kings, conquered and constructed again and again, Delhi in its present avatar is a tough city to love. Yet many still …