that time in delhi
8.29 - 9.02, 2018 | 16 YO | FUJI X-T2
A little after settling in at Woodstock International School in the Himalayas, my camera died. It happened actually on Indian independence day when the screen of my camera broke. I didn’t bash it or anything, the wire that connects the panel to the body just snapped on its own. I suppose all mechanical things eventually come to a point of breakage; I simply flipped open my screen too many times. But I still was devastated. Few things make me feel “depressed”, but this was definitely one of the few things that’s ever brought sharp pain to my heart. I had come all the way to a school in the Himalayas where gorgeous weather is in constant motion unlike Los Angeles, and my camera broke just after a month of arriving. But thanks to my camera’s breakage, it lead to a bonus visit to Delhi.
To There
So within the week following the devastation, I constructed a plan with my father. Once I told him what had happened, he told me to look for service centers. And sure enough, there were around five, official Fujifilm service centers, all in India. From there, I slowly began to piece together this prospective trip to Delhi to fix my camera.
Flow In
Immediately after landing in Delhi, I got an Uber directly to the service center, and I was suddenly riding through a crowd of cars on a 10-lane road. As I waited for my camera to be fixed at Delhi Fujifilm, I saw a Japanese pass by - that was cool. Within half-an-hour I was out with a brand new screen on my camera. The screen turning on for the first time in a few weeks made me smile.
It also just so happened that Zac Boswell, a classmate and a friend of my mother, was stopping through Delhi. He had finished a rickshaw race with his friends across India and they were now spending their remaining days in Delhi to rest before their travels back to the states.
I met Zac at his hotel after I had got my camera fixed, and we took the metro to a Thai restaurant. The subway was fine, some stations were expectantly chaotic, but I would later find out that the elevated trains were much more impressive. Being able to see Zac in Delhi was a very cool thing to be able to do. It felt otherworldly; we only happened to meet each other in Delhi because I was studying in the Himalayas, and he had for some reason gone on a rickshaw race across India.
Wake Up
The transportation in Delhi blew me away. The train system is still very low-scale, but the important thing is that it just works. There was also, of course, Uber, and that too was great. I assumed that pick-ups would be a complete mess, but it wasn’t. And after having such a great experience with normal cars, I eventually started to exclusively use Uber Motos.
Waking up to my first morning in Delhi felt a bit magical. Like many cities, it’s bustling with action, and there’s a delightful mix of a past and future world. But Delhi specifically is just so loud. So when it’s seven in the morning, there’s a wonderful feeling of sharing the silence with everyone else in the city.
The last time I was in Delhi before this was when I was 13. That was when my grandmother lived in Delhi, the first time I traveled alone, and it eventually became my first Medium post. And I guess unsurprisingly, so much had changed since then. There were now those trains and Ubers that were reliable, but there were also food delivery apps, and pressed juices were a common thing to be able to find. Delhi is obviously a far more exciting city to watch than any city in the U.S.
Thinking about Delhi from where I live now in Mussoorie, it’s such an odd city for me. I’m presumably not going to be spending much time in it, ever. It’s going to just serve as a transit hub for many trips in and out of the country. Riding on the trains, I think the coolest thing I noticed was the increase in the salarymen. There’s something peaceful about them to be around.
Day Four
Along with my goal of eating as much food as I could, going to Muji was a top priority. When I discovered that the store opened its first one in India last year, I was overjoyed. Even though I hardly bought anything, it was a wonderful time travel machine.
Delhi’s air is dreadful. I could feel the air particles hitting my skin while riding the Uber Motos. The closest thing I have to compare it to is Bangkok. But Delhi is special in its own way - it’s just so vibrant - and I’m glad I could experience it briefly while I live in this country for a period of my life.
