Delhi 6
The City of Transits
How should one describe a nation’s capital? What is its importance? Isn’t it simply a large city housing prominent administrative buildings? Do things change if the capital under consideration holds the seat of the throne that directs the fate of more than a billion people? Can a city reflect the nerve of the largest democracy on the planet? Can it uncover realities that thrive amidst the glory of a rising power? Can it fulfill the aspirations of the millions that leave their ancestral villages to settle in a new suburban home? Finally, can it drive the change that we want to bring in the society? Apart from being a transit to the heart of a nation, can it be a transit for the heart of the nation and lead it to the transcendental state sought after by its people?
Death might be called the universal truth, but what is more interesting is life. Life would be dull if deprived of creativity. Creativity thrives where there are emotions. Emotions rise high during tragedies. Tragedies are always accompanied by sorrow. Sorrow can be felt only when there is joy. Joy from deep within the heart gives way to bliss. Bliss occurs the moment you are blessed. And blessed are those who have been to Delhi, enjoyed their stay, and come back or gone ahead with only dull stories to tell!
From early 2019, I have made a large number of travels to Delhi for various purposes, none of them being simply to roam around. However, I have strolled the crowded streets of Old Delhi, done shopping in the busy circles of Connaught Place and in Palika Bazaar, eaten food in the posh restaurants at Chanakyapuri, ridden metros through the technology hubs at Gurgaon and Noida, strolled anxiously among thieves and policemen at not-to-be-announced-publicly places, felt proud at the feet of the Mahatma at Rajghat, and explored where do I lie between the two extremes of trying to never visit the city again and of making it a home to hone my creativity.
As you know from Tryst with America (hope you are following The Stark Traveller), my first experience with Delhi ended with nothing less than a personal catastrophe. However, that was just one of the experiences I have had with my several travels to Delhi since then. The feelings associated with each of the travels have been complicated, but worth telling nevertheless.
From the time of its announcement, several friends have been asking me about the ‘6’ in the title of this article. Let me admit: While penning down the titles of the various planned articles, my strategy was to simply give the name that first came to my mind while associating those places with my experiences. With Delhi, it was from the song “Sasural Genda Phool” of the movie Delhi-6! Colloquially, Delhi 6 refers to the oldest areas of Delhi, having the pin code 110006. I knew that my article, though it definitely includes it, is not going to be limited to Old Delhi. A few friends guessed that it might be about six of my travels to Delhi in the past year. However, reckoning that my thoughts about visiting Delhi as well as the experiences obtained therein brought in several moments of emotional highs, I have chosen to describe six emotional traits that I associate with my travels to, and my fantasies about, the capital city of my nation: pride, fear, wit, aspirations, patience, and freedom.
1. Pride
India has three national holidays, but as children, we particularly were interested in two: 15th August (Independence Day) and 26th January (Republic Day). On the former date in 1947, our first prime minister raised the Tiranga (tricolor) atop the Red Fort, and on the latter date in 1950, we got our own constitution built on the principles of justice, liberty, equality and fraternity. On both these dates every year, children gather in schools to celebrate our country’s history and the sacrifices of its forefathers (another excitement being the boondi ka laddoo, a pan-India sweet we somehow tend to eat only twice a year!). Though I used to be a responsible citizen on the Independence Day, I used to try avoiding the school on the Republic Day. At times I was unsuccessful because some or the other teacher used to find me to be the best candidate for compering the ceremony or delivering a speech. However, I recall myself hooked on to the television set on most of my Republic Days, watching the glorious parade on New Delhi’s Rajpath — the road of the government.
As I used to watch the disciplined march comprising the powerful tanks and missiles, the valiant soldiers of regiments from across India, the sounds of the trumpets singing various national tunes, and finally the colorful dances performed by excited happy children, my little chest used to get filled with pride, my eyes filled with dreams of bringing glory to the country, my mind filled with hopes to live among the great fathers and mothers of my nation, and my dreams filled with wishes to see the city that hosted such emotions on its roads and in its peoples — the national capital Delhi.
Whenever I visit Delhi, I make sure to accommodate one or more of the uncountable number of places of national identity into my itinerary. I have tried to visit the Red Fort twice, but co-incidentally, each time it was around one of the two national holidays, thus being closed for public (it does look grand even from outside). However, some of you might know about my liking of several qualities of the Mahatma (for example, see One Step Enough for Me and Let there be Gandhi), and though he is best known as a freedom fighter, I experienced a saintly calm while being at Rajghat, a memorial for Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi. To his credulous critics: Gandhi might have made mistakes, but they only make him more human; he in particular possessed the quality of accepting his mistakes and moving ahead with a flexible yet uncompromising determination — qualities which, if possessed by most humans, will solve many problems and conflicts, both within and without.
2. Fear
ISBT Kashmiri Gate ane wala hai. Samaan utha lo aur mobile andar rakh lo. Ae sahab, headphone laga ke mat ghumna idhar. Poora dhyaan apne samaan aur pocket pe rakhein. Baahar nikal ke seedhe paidal nikal lena aur bus stand ke andar ghus jana. Private gaadiyon ke chakkar me mat padna; jaha jana hai waha ke state ki government bus ke office ke aas-paas ja ke saavdhani se wait karna. Kucch khana-wana mat. Ye Dilli hai bhai, aapka airport nahi; baad me bolna mat kisi ne bataya nahi.
(We are about to reach the Inter-State Bus Terminus at Kashmiri Gate. Take your luggage and keep your cell phones inside. Hey sir, don’t roam around with your headphones on. Keep your complete attention on your luggage and pockets. Once you get down, walk straight into the bus stand. Don’t get trapped into taking private vehicles; simply go and wait carefully near the government transport office of your destination state. Don’t eat anything random. This is Delhi, my friend, not your airport; don’t complain later that nobody cautioned you.)
This is how the conductor of a special airport-pickup government bus I had boarded from the airport cautioned the travelers before dropping them off at one of the largest bus terminals of the country, from where the airport-type innocent passengers were to continue their journeys to their native states. Pick-pocketing is neither unique to Delhi nor to India (wait for a similar announcement in Rendezvous with Athena). However, over the last few decades, Delhi has earned a severely bad reputation for even heinous crimes.
In 2012, the whole country stood to demand stricter punishments and laws when they heard about the utterly inhuman gang-rape in a bus at Delhi. I recall one of my friends telling me around the same time that irrespective of the polluted air, she doesn’t take a taxi (and prefers an auto rickshaw instead) when returning from her workplace at Ghaziabad (one of the cities forming the National Capital Region, abbreviated as NCR, along with Delhi). Deliberations in Indian families last days, when a child finishing school asks for permission to prepare for the prestigious civil services exam at Delhi, because parents are scared of sending their pupils to the city, even when they have a relative who agrees to accommodate the kid.
What brings such shames to the supposedly model, grand old, city? The answer partly lies in the omnipresent problems of poverty and unemployment, but more so in the way the society trains the younger generation, arguably the boys in particular. One of the major ways to handle this crisis, in my opinion, is proper education (but more on that some time later).
3. Wit
The bus conductor of the previous section did not stop at scaring the travelers about the problem; he also apprised them of a simple and (to the extent your luck supports) effective solution:
Mobile rakho bag ke andar, bag taango saamne, aur jeb rakho khali.
(Keep the cell phone in your bag, cling the bag to your front, and keep your pockets empty.)
Delhi is the only city in India that houses two governments: the central government and the state government, forcing its citizens to live in complete confusion about which government is responsible for which beneficiary scheme (or mismanaged problem). However, that only adds to one of the primary traits associated with Delhiites: wit. Not unlike the partial work-around to pick-pocketing, you would find that the people of Delhi (and growingly, of the whole of India) can outsmart any and all difficulties using jugaad (a term Oxford dictionary defines as involving the use of skill and imagination to find an easy solution to a problem or to fix or make something using cheap, basic items). Beware, that does not mean that they are not used to solving problems in a systematic manner, an example of the same being the odd-even scheme to control pollution — Delhi being one of the first Indian cities to implement it strictly — which was indeed found to curb particulate matter levels in the air noticeably.
I experienced another example of wit when I had to catch an international flight in an almost-missed manner. The airline informed me that if I do not reach by 11:00 for the flight at 12:00, then help will be out of their hands. I took a taxi without even having the time to negotiate the price. The driver did whatever he could and dropped me at 10:59 (Google had showed my estimated arrival time as 11:24, so I would leave the kinds of things he did to your imagination). Finally, he didn’t let me go till I paid him INR 4000 (paid online — no need to carry so much cash now-a-days in India) for a trip that would have otherwise costed not more than INR 1200. When I mentioned to him that he was looting me, he pointed to the watch, wittily blinked a corner of his eye, and agreed, remarking that he deserved to do so at the moment.
4. Aspirations
India has three major technology hubs: at Bengaluru in the south, at Pune in the west, and at Delhi-NCR in the north. These cities are the backbones of the Indian information technology (IT) revolution of early twenty-first century. The result of the IT revolution has had several dimensions, including strengthening the Indian middle class. Millions of Indians born in the eighties and the nineties have been its beneficiaries — definitely in monetary terms, but also in terms of the new outlook towards the west.
Delhi-NCR forms the largest set of cities in the upper half of India. There is a high chance that at least one out of four of your graduating friends, pursuing an engineering degree, would land him/her-self at Delhi. The result has been a culture of malls, parties, pubs, and food (the thing I am most interested in, out of the four). Name a country — you would find its cuisine in Delhi, not to forget the tasty Indian varieties themselves near Chandni Chowk. Name a brand — you would find its outlet at Connaught Place. In fact, while on one hand there are slums housing the poor and suburbs housing the middle class, on the other hand there are posher-than-posh localities housing the rich. I remember once going to a particular mall at Chanakyapuri (all those embassies are here, Visa aspirants), for example, where I couldn’t decide if it was indeed a shopping complex or a mistakenly placed palace.
In essence, a powerful emotion Delhi raises is that of aspirations, of those of the common man as well as those of the rich businessmen. You have the opportunity to delve into whatever you would like to. An analogy here deserves mention: as Chennai is to music and culture, Mumbai is to arts, so is Delhi to politics and literature. As soon as Covid-19 walks away, I am in particular looking forward to visiting one of the grandest book fairs of the world, hosted every year at Delhi (pick-pockets — please spare my innocence).
5. Patience
During one of my failed attempts at visiting the Red Fort, I was pushed by the crowd (along with one friend) to the busy streets of Old Delhi. Realizing it was difficult to walk back, we decided to simply keep walking ahead.
Old Delhi reflects the chapters read as part of the Mughal history in your school. There are forts, monuments, mosques, shops, eateries, road-side vendors, and what not (the socks I wear in 2020 were bought there in early 2019, four for fifty — a great deal!). Even though the area was extremely crowded, my friend and I unknowingly lost emotion number 2 from above, and re-lived our history books, while ticking off many names from our places to visit list. Finally, we found our way out and our bags full.
Now coming back to patience: Delhi for me, as hinted before, has more often been a place of transit than that of tourism. I have spent several hours at one or the other of the three terminals of the Indira Gandhi International (IGI) airport, waiting for a connection. Terminal 3, being the largest, even has its own radio station called Mirchi T3. Much of my interest in writing is due to the time spent at T3, patiently reading books, with the Mirchi T3 song playing in the backdrop.
When you sit at an airport of a large transit hub such as Delhi, you also get to familiarize yourself with a vast diversity — that of your country as well as from abroad. Next time you go there, say hi to the naughty kid who would always disobey his/her mother and break the line, finally obtaining a pass-way for the whole family from the smiling staff.
One word of caution: they would announce the IGI Airport at New Delhi to be a silent one, and just when you are about to doze off, they would change your departure gate to the one at the other end of the large terminal — of course, they want you to do window-shopping from each and every corner of the airport — so don’t be too patient at Delhi after all!
6. Freedom
April 2011; Jantar Mantar, New Delhi. More than a billion eyes are either physically at the location or hooked to the television. A 73-year old man, wearing a white skull cap resembling the ones used by freedom fighters in early twentieth century in India, sits on a hunger strike. Over the next few days, Indians from all over the world throng the venue: many people older than the chief protestor take trains to reach Delhi and support the strike; many people younger than the writer of this article bunk their schools/colleges to mobilize the movement; many rich family men and women leave their jobs to support the cause. What was going on? India was fighting for a second freedom, this time against the evil that engulfs all what was hoped for after obtaining the first one: corruption. The peaceful protest and the fast stopped after several days, re-iterated again later in the year, not only leading to laws and bills against corruption, but bringing up a longer-lasting revolution in the minds of the country’s youth and oldies alike.
The India Against Corruption movement of 2011 was neither the first nor the last movement staged at Delhi. Not only because it is the national capital, Delhi has been the platform for bringing about several revolutionary transformations. An important emotion that I can associate with Delhi thus, related to the ones discussed previously, is of transforming one’s soul against its evils. It remains to be seen if and how the aspirations of the millions associated with the city continue to be cherished by the mix of the old and the new that the city stands to offer. The city of transits awaits your next trip (which reminds me: if you miss South Indian food like me, there is a nice outlet outside T3 — try Rava dosa there during your next transit).
If you read the first paragraph of this article carefully, I did not term Delhi as the heart of India, but just as a transit. I think the heart of India does not lie in Delhi — it simply cannot be accommodated in a city — India’s heart itself runs through the veins of the whole country, and there is no single mirror that can reflect its valour. We shall try to peek into the same further in the forthcoming article India through IITs; till then, it’s just a complex story.
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