Yeh Delhi hai mere yaar…
bas ishq mohabbat pyaar…. So goes the song from the film, Delhi-6, that I mentioned in my last post. This is Delhi, my friend, nothing but love, it croons…..
I miss Delhi. Over the last two months, I had many a moment to mull over my sentiments about this mad city. It is a cliche to say that people have a love-hate relationship with Delhi, but alas, this is true and I am no different. It’s not just the fact that most of my friends in India live there, or that it’s the nerve-centre of the history academy, or that I have bittersweet memories of past lives. It’s also its many quirks and vices that are difficult to categorize. So here are some random likes and dislikes.
L) I love the months of Feb-March in the city when the dry winter gives way to a hesitant short spring. You can go from woollen vests to thin cotton tops in a span of ten days around Holi. Gardens all over are in riotous bloom, especially the roses at the President’s residence, but I especially love the bougainvillea that pours out on to footpaths like pink paint from a can knocked over, and the silk-cotton flowers strewn all over the ground.
D) For all its greenery, I detest the wasteland that is the central, planned city of “Lutyens” New Delhi. Everyone seems to ooh and aah about its lush elegance, its colonial bungalows, landscaped rotaries and tree-lined avenues, but the area is an effing nightmare for pedestrians. The lack of proper traffic lights turns the mildest of drivers into raving lunatics, while it takes pedestrians an eternity to cross a road or rotary. To say nothing about the fact that this suburban, made-for-cars layout in the middle of the city, with no shops or people to keep it alive after sundown, makes it very unsafe for women to walk around by themselves right in the heart of town.
L) But I gotta say, in the late winter afternoon sun, walking a kilometre or two down these avenues for lunch from the archives to one of the State houses for various regional cuisines, gossiping and laughing with friends, or alone, spotting birds in the trees is wonderful. This is also the time when Delhi comes alive with concerts – classical dance, play competitions in different languages, free music concerts in the parks, food and film and handicraft festivals… it’s hard to decide what to go to and what to miss. In general, I favoured food over film, but I managed a good dose of the rest as well!
D)But the whole place also has a kind of sarkari stench hanging over it. Compared to the crass malls of Gurgaon and the shining lights of privatization all over the country, this Nehruvian-elite govt-servant scene in the capital seems positively benign to many, but it sets my teeth on edge. It’s not just the “lal-batti” culture of politicians with commando security and blinking cars holding traffic ransom at will. Everything from the clipped accents to the ethnic-chic elegance and the hush and rustle of well-heeled power that self-deprecatingly and disingenuously masks itself as middle-class is at once very familiar and quite repellent.
L) Delhi-ites reading this will snort in disbelief when they read this, but I actually enjoyed public transportation this time round. I’m not just talking about the Metro, which is fucking amazing. I travelled by DTC and chartered buses every day to work and back, and experienced some of the camaraderie of daily commuters that I hadn’t before. In the green government buses, the conductor sits at the back, making everyone go to him to get their ticket. In the rush hour pickle, this is not really possible. So people sitting on his side of the bus pass money back and forth to passengers throughout the bus. “1 seven,” “2 three,” “1 five,” they chant, telling him how many tickets of what denomination. They also pass back the tickets and change along the same chain, with a dispute occasionally breaking out and some accountant gamely rising to the occasion to solve it. The conductor robotically just dispenses tickets and passes them on. I had to do that once and very quickly lost my patience, but am amazed at how long others’ good humour (given that this is Delhi, after all) lasted.
D)The private Blueline bus-walas are barbarians for the most part, and regularly mow down people on the streets. Their conductors can dramatically improve your swear-word vocabulary in two days. Their status as a haven for molesters is also legendary, and this is easily one of the most hateful things about Delhi, bus commuting having scarred generations of women’s relationships with public space in the city. But I was surprised that I felt safer in them than I remember, with so many more women in all kinds of clothes in the buses, toting phones, backpacks, briefcases… I wonder whether mine was really a rose-tinted one-off experience, or if I’m just older (as a friend suggested, try asking younger women!), or whether Delhi’s male bus passengers are – gasp! – a tad improved on their humanity index?
L) But if the Blueline buses are a tribute to the Wild west, the Metro is positively brimming with civilization. It’s a shining symbol of the new India, but it retains a good dose of old Nehruvian societal improvement through homilies and maxims. Advice on dos and don’ts from watching out for unclaimed baggage, to moving to the centre of the carriage, to not spitting, to minding the gap, is fitted in neatly between station announcements. These regularly made me laugh, because they are so typical of the many faces of Delhi. A male baritone in a sardonic voice straight from a poetry session across in the old walled city, dressed in a sherwani and the grease of many a kabab, does the Hindi ones. “Aglaa station…” it says thoughtfully, taking a pause, as if to repeat the first phrase of the couplet, “Chandni chowk hai. Yahaan“.. (another thoughtful pause)… “Bharatiya Rail ke Dilli station ke liye badleiN.” (pause before the poem’s punchline..) “Saavdhaaniise utreiN.” Just as you are pondering the meaning of the poem, a school-marmy English female voice follows, in a clipped convent-educated-elite voice: “The next station is Chandni Chowk,” it spits out, with all the native elite’s contempt for native words. “Change here for the Delhi station of the Indian Railways Network. Mind the Gap.” You can almost feel the cane stinging your palm as you leave the train, your ears smarting with the punishment she has just doled out, and the sound of r’s correctly rolled.
So many random observations, so little space! All in all, it’s difficult to arrive at a balance sheet with the city. There is so much that I love and despise there, I wish I could keep going back on a regular basis just to keep the debate going in my head. Those reading this who have a similar love-hate relationship with Delhi, what are your pet raves and rants?
(A bunch of people asked why the blog has been so silent, and after digging deep for angsty reasons, I realised a practical one was a mental block against posts with pictures. Well, so here I am, trying to break it, with a post without pictures, totally covering up for not taking interesting pictures of the city while I was there.)
I have a similar love/hate relationship with Moscow, although all my individual points would be very different. St. Petersburg always comes out as love–even though there are a few things that annoy me about the city, the love triumphs (and given that one of the bothersome things is that you can’t drink the water, that’s saying something).
I think I’d rather have a love/hate city than an indifferent city. That’s my current problem with Toronto–there’s not much I dislike about it, but nor is there much that I’m truly enthused about. Ah, well. In a month, I’m off for a year!
(And I get the blogging problem. I’ve been uninspired to take pictures recently, and the blog suffers.)
Delhi sounds amazing, both for the good and bad. I found your site recently because of the BPT sweater, but have stuck around because of your wonderful descriptions of things. Glad you’re back online!
I’d like to visit simply to expand my swear word vocabulary. And the photographic opportunities. And the food. The Architecture. And the hand spinning.
Second to what you wrote, there is not place like Delhi. In spite of all the problems I continue to stick around this place and culturally its really happening.
I’ve never been to Delhi – but you make it so vivid, even without pictures. Please don’t be put off by a lack of photos!
Can I just say again that you are a darn good writer? I know all these places, I think all these things and yet I wanted to know what you’d say in the next line. The description of the Metro announcers is just perfect!
Prachi! Forgive this blog intrusion, but I have an email out to you about “business” to your Berkeley address and kindly request your response!
Fantastic! Ah, Delhi. So glad to hear the Metro is a wonderful thing.
Nothing to do with Delhi, but your account of the metro announcements reminded me of the train station in Igatpuri, where I was struggling to not laugh out loud at the elaborate prose used to warn us against unknown objects, suspicious persons, etc.
The woman speaking English did not have the convent school, know-English-better-than-the-English attitude. She was more like Eliza Doolittle straight from elocution class, with carefully precise vowels and model enunciation. I almost lost it when she informed us that “travelling without a properly issued ticket is not only a criminal offense, it is a Social Evil.”
(And yes, there’s a URL with my name – gasp. I’m tentatively blogging. You’ll notice that while you have difficulty with a post of all text & no photos, I have no problem posting photos & no text!)
Hello!
thanks for the comment you left at anothersubcontinent.
this blog post echoes most of my thoughts about dilli. Have you seen Mayank Austen soofi that focuses almost entirely on Delhi.
Z
oops I meant Mayank austen soofi’s blog http://thedelhiwalla.blogspot.com/
about busses and public transport…
i’ve noticed this change too. when i first came to live in delhi in 1989 i’d rarely see (unaccompanied) women at bus stops after it got dark, unless these were big stops like isbt, mandi house, aiims, etc. now you see women at bus stops right up to 9-10 pm… still very unsatisfactory but quite a change. also the dress that women wear in busses has changed too, in that less of their bodies are covered…
but there seems to be another change too. in the 1990s PLUs would actually be seen in busses (DTC or blue-line). now, other than students, there has been a marked lowering of the class line which uses busses. friends tell me that the number of chartered busses have reduced by a third and half from areas like PPG while the number of people commuting has only increased. so while public transport is surely becoming better in delhi, the “better” classes are withdrawing into their private vehicles.
*PLU = peepul like us